


Blood in The Cut

by notmanos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Lucifer Trauma, Martyr Dean, Parasites, bye freddy, everything's either cold or on fire, jody's a badass, psychic punk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24231700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notmanos/pseuds/notmanos
Summary: (Season 11) The Winchesters are out of it and dying slow, leaving Jody and Claire to figure out what attacked them - and what its plans are - before their time runs out.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 19





	1. Destination Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to write a story about Jody and Claire doing their own hunt. So here it is.

**_ 1 - Destination Unknown _ **

When Jody saw what time it was, she immediately wondered who she was going to fire for this. Or kill. No one should be calling her from the station at three in the goddamn morning, unless the end of the world was happening.

Oh shit. That was possible. Blearily, she picked up her phone. “What?”

“Uh, sorry to bother you, Sheriff,” Officer Sanchez said. “But, uh, we had a report of an abandoned car, and I thought you might be interested in it.”

She sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and wondering if she heard him correctly. Because, of all the things to be woken up about, abandoned car was probably right next to stray dog and littering in the park. It was an insane thing to call her about, even at three in the afternoon. “You are not calling me about an abandoned car.”

“Uh, I know, it sounds weird -“

“No, it doesn’t sound weird, Officer. It sounds like a one way trip to the unemployment line. Why the hell would I give a shit about an abandoned car?”

Then he told her, and her heart felt like it plunged into her stomach.

**

She saw it as soon as she turned onto Elm Street, equally aware that the name of it was weirdly on point. It was a hulking black shadow in the middle of the road, although there was light inside, as the driver’s side door was open.

She couldn’t tell it was Dean on the ground until she got out of her car, because he managed to stay out of the meager light available. He was face down on the road, left hand stretched out, and if she knew him at all - and boy, did she - there had been a weapon in that hand. The fact that it wasn’t there now seemed to indicate someone else had been here.  Were they still here? She kept her head on a swivel, but it was a quiet twilight street. The only thing moving seemed to be her. 

“Dean?” she asked, crouching down. He didn’t move. “Come on, get up. Nobody sleeps in the street in my town.” Nothing. She carefully put a hand on his neck, and wondered what she would do if he was already cold. But she felt a pulse. A distressingly slow one, but there. 

She got closer, and saw Sam slumped over in the passenger seat. He hadn’t even gotten the chance to get out of the car. He hadn’t had time to pull a weapon either. She expected to see his laptop in his lap, but it wasn’t. Was it in the car? He traveled everywhere with that. Had the person/thing that took Dean’s gun take Sam’s computer too? Why? A close look at Sam revealed he was breathing too. 

She visually searched for a clue, not yet ready to do a hand’s on search, but there was nothing. Damn, did Dean vacuum the Impala on the regular? Her carpets were never this clean. Hell, she could go back to her truck right now, and pull out a couple of French fries from under the seat. She bet he had nothing but weapons under there.Then again, she had better things to do with her time than be anal about her truck. You’d think Dean would too. 

Okay. So assuming someone was physically here to grab Dean’s gun and Sam’s laptop ... why was there no signs of a fight? And there would have been a fight, if either of them were conscious. So what kind of being could knock them out without leaving any sign of a struggle? And be aware enough to grab those items? What fresh hell was this?

Jody was still looking at the Impala from the outside, careful not to touch anything yet, when the EMTs arrived. She recognized Jordan and Hicks, as she’d seen them at a lot of car crash scenes. Hicks looked at her, and then looked at Dean on the ground. “What the hell happened here?” she asked.

Jody shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell me.” 

Hicks went to Sam, while Jordan went to Dean. Jody half expected him to turn over Dean and reveal a bullet wound in his chest, fist sized and impossible to live through, but he looked uninjured. Just asleep. 

Jordan did a standard quick triage, trying to ascertain the nature of the problem, but Jody could tell he was confused. He pried open Dean’s eyes and shined a light in them, but there was nothing but white. “Uh,” Jordan said, sitting back on his haunches. “This makes no sense.” 

“What is it?” Jody asked.

He looked up at her and shrugged. “Heart rate’s a little low, but normal. BP’s normal. No obvious injuries, but this dude is like out cold. I mean, ten minutes into a narcolepsy fit cold.”

  
“Same with this one,” Hicks reported. 

“They’re not narcoleptic,” Jody said, scrubbing a hand through her hair. She was really tired, but she knew she wasn’t getting back to sleep tonight. 

Honestly, she could have cursed the Winchester's for coming back into her territory and not giving her the head’s up on what they were hunting ... but maybe they meant to. Maybe they were on their way, when whatever they were after got them first. 

But what got them? Why was there no sign of it on the car or on them?

Man, she didn’t need this shit.

**

The hospital at this time of night was not busy. Which was why Jody, only half paying attention to things going on, noticed the blonde in the leather jacket right away.

  
“What the hell?” she snapped, as Claire helped a teenage girl into one of the lobby chairs. The girl was younger than Claire, maybe fifteen at a push, and Jody didn’t recognize her. “We had a deal. No late night sweeps without telling me where you’re going and when you’ll be back.”

She rolled her eyes, but came over as soon as the girl was settled in her seat. “It was an emergency, okay? I got an alert about these idiots going to the old Sawyer place -“

“Alert?” Jody asked. “What do you mean you have an alert set up?”

“On social media, okay? I mean, nowadays dumbasses tweet or insta when they visit haunted places. I set up alerts so if one of the boneheads around here went someplace dangerous, I could save their stupid asses.” Claire jerked her head towards the girl in the chair. “She’s someone’s younger sister. Seems when the ghosts started acting up, they fled, and she ended up trapped in the house.”

Jody crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn’t happy with this, but the Sawyer place was honestly a nightmare. Apparently a serial killer had lived there - undiscovered until his accidental death on the premises - and now there were about half a dozen restless spirits there, many of them with bodies and bones that had never been recovered. So they couldn’t be salted and burned; they could only wander the house and do harm to whoever came inside. Jody had already talked to the Winchesters about it, and they came to the conclusion that while burning the house down might help, it was no guarantee the ghosts would leave. The land itself could be haunted until the remains were recovered. Jody was still tempted to burn it down, because it seemed to be a right of passage for local kids to dare each other to go in, and inevitably get hurt. “You didn’t tell me,” Jody repeated, keeping her voice low. She was starting to feel a headache coming on, but it was the combination of the lack of sleep and so many problems she had to solve. 

“It was an emergency,” Claire claimed. “I left a note.”

It wasn’t that Jody wasn’t sympathetic. She still had tattoos from her rebellious teen phase to prove it. But Claire couldn’t have started up again at a worse time.  “Is she badly hurt?” 

Claire shrugged. “Scratched and bruised. I think she’s more freaked out than anything, but the scratches on her arm are pretty deep.”

Jody made herself take a breath, and not get angry. It wouldn’t help anything, and it would make her headache worse. “Good job rescuing her. But I don’t want you doing this alone from now on. Not until we figure out what took out the Winchesters.”

“But I -” It was visible when Claire realized what Jody had just said. “Take out the Winchesters? What are you talking about?”

“Their car was found in the center of Elm, and they were both out cold. No sign of any attack, save for Dean’s gun and Sam’s laptop being missing. What happened, as far as I can work out, is something took out Sam first, and Dean reacted to that, but not in time."

“On Elm Street?” Claire grimaced. “Have we ruled out Freddy Krueger?”

Jody would have told her now was not the time for jokes, but that had occurred to her. “Could you imagine him lasting five minutes against them?”

“Dean would totally fanboy over him and want his autograph,” Claire said. “And then probably shoot him in the head.”

“Several times.” Jody could actually imagine this, as well as him and Sam salting and burning the remains just to be sure. It would be a very short reboot; more like a trailer. 

Claire was trying to be tough and nonchalant, but Jody saw it anyway - concern. Her relationship with them was odd and a little inexplicable, especially when you broke it down - their angel friend’s vessel was originally her father, and that was a strange, fraught relationship on its own - but Jody basically accepted they were sort of her Uncles. Kind of. It was probably as close as a description that would ever fit. “How are they?”

She could have sugar coated it, but there was no point. “Physically unharmed as far as the doctors can tell, and in deep comas.”

“What ... what are they doing for them?”

“Right now? There’s not a lot they can do. They’re monitoring their conditions, but as it stands now, they asked me to look up next of kin for them, which I already know I can’t.” They were each other’s next of kin. Side by side in matching hospital rooms. Which was probably the way they’d want to go, if they had to pick one. 

Claire’s eyes widened in alarm. “They’re dying?”

“Technically, yes. But since they have no idea what’s wrong with them, they don’t know if they have twelve hours or twelve months.” Jody wasn’t trying to be flippant. She was so frustrated she wanted to start tearing her hair out, or better yet, start punching. They were doctors - they should have some idea of what to do, even if it was a supernatural illness. Well, okay, maybe they had an excuse in that case. 

“Do you know what they were hunting?”

“Not a clue.”

“Did you check their phones?”

“Sam’s phone is locked. I’ve tried the obvious words, but I have a feeling Sam’s phone is not locked with an obvious word.” He probably showed off like the smarty pants he was. 

“What about Dean’s phone?”

“Do you really think there won’t be something horrifying on there that will change our opinion of him forever?”

Claire considered that a moment. “I saw him after he killed a room full of people when the Mark had him. I don’t think my opinion can be changed at this point.”

Wow. How had Jody forgot that? Of course, Jody had seen the Mark come out too. But it was clear it wasn’t Dean. It was a ... thing. A really obnoxious, psychopathic thing. “Fine. Let’s see if we can find it.”

Jody led the way, and no one stopped her, because no one would dare. Being a Sheriff had few perks, but this was one of them. 

Dean was in the ICU along with Sam, both of them hooked up to the same number of monitors and drips. The only difference was in beats per minute right now. It was sterile, white, and gave Jody a horrible feeling in her stomach. How many people in her life had gone into the hospital, never to return again? The worst part was when they returned not alive. Who knew there were things worse than death?

On the way to Dean’s room, Claire made a call. “Hello, Castiel? Dean and Sam are in a real bad way, and need you as soon as possible. So get here now.” Yes, the Winchesters’ angel friend, and Claire’s pseudo-father. Again, working out a family tree on this would be insane. 

“That’s probably their best bet,” Jody admitted. 

Claire shrugged. “I’m surprised he didn’t pop into existence already. Using Dean’s name usually makes him come running.” At Jody’s curious glance, she added, “Castiel’s totally in love with him, but I don’t think he has the emotional context to figure out what that means to him. And Dean loves him back, but, same. I mean, I get it from Castiel, he’s basically an alien, but Dean ... he’s just fucked up.”

Jody scoffed to hide a laugh. Yeah, he was. Hell, both he and Sam were. “I don’t see how you have their lives and not end up that way.”

Claire shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

Dean’s things were in a container in his hospital room, and the first thing in the box was a coat. It was just a canvas jacket, olive drab, pretty standard, except when she lifted it up, Jody almost sprained her wrist. “Holy shit, are there lead weights in this thing?” She put it down, hearing a couple of unusually heavy things. The jacket had two standard pockets, but it felt like things were everywhere. Frisking the jacket, she pulled it open, and saw a mother load of added pockets inside the coat. These weren’t store original - the stitching was exposed, the fabric wasn’t the same, and there were different colored threads. In fact ... did this one smell of mint? It did. Was it dental floss? There was only one way this came about. “Dean sews!” she exclaimed, happy to find out something about him that wasn't terrifying or hopelessly sad. Was this a hobby? She always wondered if they had hobbies beyond drinking themselves to death and cleaning weapons. “In fact, he sews a hell of a lot better than I could.” Jody refused to admit to Claire she failed home economics in high school. She was glad it wasn’t a subject schools taught anymore. 

Patting down the jacket, she thought she found his phone, but it turned out to a cartridge full of silver bullets. Second thing she found was his phone. She took a deep breath, steeling herself, and activated it.

It was still on from when they brought him in, and the battery was starting to run low, but Jody figured she had enough time to a cursory search. He hadn’t sent a text message in days, and the last one was a taunting one to Sam - probably some kind of sibling in-joke no outsider would ever understand - so no help there. She searched through his history, and was relieved to find no porn or hentai or whatever the hell he was into. Maybe he was smart enough not to have anything incriminating on his phone. Finally, she found something.

It was a map, tracing a route from somewhere called Fredricksen, Colorado, to Sioux Falls. What the hell was in Fredricksen, Colorado? And why was it coming here?

  
She turned to tell Claire she finally had an angle to work, and saw how she was standing far from Dean’s bed, but was studying him as if she expected him to suddenly leap up and surprise her. 

Claire reminded Jody quite a bit of herself. Claire had been cultivating this hardass, macho ‘tude and swagger, partially earned, and partially play acting. Faking it until she made it. Jody didn’t blame her - her life had been tough, and extremely strange. How many could say their dad walked out on them because he became possessed by an angel? Claire had to become hard to survive that and everything that came after, including her mother going missing. But she put walls in front of walls, trying to bury herself in armor, and when the dam burst, it was a hell of a thing. Jody was trying to encourage her to talk it out, to not let it build up, but she knew she was guilty of that too. But sometimes, she wondered how Claire managed to stay upright with such a big chip on her shoulder. Jody wasn’t like that as a kid, was she? She liked to think not, but her mother may have had an alternate opinion.

Claire finally looked at her, and her face was stone. Eyes on down, she was unreadable. After all this time, Jody actually knew how to interpret this. It meant she didn’t know how to feel about something, so she was going to pretend to feel nothing, and figure it out later. Jody understood that. Sometimes it was the best way forward. “Find anything?”

“I’ve got us a lead,” Jody admitted, slipping Dean’s phone in her pocket. “Now, let’s see if we can figure it out.” Jody didn’t say  _ before they died _ , but felt that was implicit.

So much for a quiet weekend. 


	2. The Sky Will Turn

**_ 2 - The Sky Will Turn _ **

**__ **

Jody dropped Claire off at home, much to her disgust, and went into the office on her own. The night shift crew were not that surprised to see her, as she often kept terrible hours. She helped herself to the sludge like overnight coffee, which was almost thick enough to stand a spoon in, but at least had enough caffeine in it to kill several smaller animals. It punched her headache back, and made her teeth vibrate. Just what she wanted.

A quick search of Fredricksen, Colorado turned up nothing but a very ugly story. About a week ago, an old barn burned down, one that had eight people in it, while the owner of the property was found to have slipped into a deep coma. There were rumors that the killings may have been “satanic” in some respects, and also, they couldn’t seem to identify any of the bodies. The fire burned incredibly hot, supposedly, but Jody knew better than this. They could have pulled identities from their dental records, unless of course their jaws were smashed. Had they been mangled long before they were burned? Nothing in the papers suggested that, but Jody was filling in her own blanks. Something really ugly happened in that barn. But what, and why?

As for the property owner, Adam Mabry, he died after three days in the coma. A reason for it had yet to be discovered.

Every hunting instinct she had was screaming at her. This was bad and wrong; something really evil and fucked up happened in that barn. But what? She thought about calling the police department in Fredricksen, but she’d have to save it for a time that someone who may have had knowledge of the case was awake. She also let her people know that, as soon as it was morning, she wanted a canvas of houses on Elm, to see if anyone had a security camera that picked up the road. Maybe that way, she’d get an idea of what she was dealing with. 

Because she had the time, Jody did a search for comas, which wouldn’t necessarily be reported in the press. But she got a couple of hits on stories about people in comas from Colorado and Nebraska, all within the last seven days. If they - or it - were traveling from Colorado to here, they’d have to pass through either Kansas or Nebraska. Was this a calling card or something? It was dropping bodies, but not in the typical way. There was a delay between the attack and the kill. On the one hand, that was good to know, because maybe she had time to track this thing down before Sam and Dean died. On the other, it wasn’t a hell of a lot of time. And what the fuck was that whole barn thing about? Her mind spit out the word sacrifice, and she couldn’t seem to stuff it back in the box. 

She searched for other, possibly related stories, but fell into many dead end wormholes. Jody was shocked to look up, and see the sun had come up, and the shift had changed. It seemed like she left the hospital an hour ago, but in reality, it had been four. 

She went home, both to make sure Alex and Claire got off to school - with Claire, it was always a crapshoot; maybe she would show up, maybe she wouldn’t - and to do a little background research.

Alex’s adaptation routine was far past over, and she almost didn’t recognize her from the girl she’d first met. She was poised and composed, and a bit of an overachiever, but she seemed very together and organized. Not at all like a girl who grew up as bait for vampires. She and Claire had a relationship best described as snippy. As far as Jody could figure out, Claire thought Alex was a “sell out” by wanting a normal life, and pretending supernatural stuff didn’t exist. And Alex thought Claire was a “head case”. Jody absolutely never wanted to get in the middle of them, but sometimes she had to. 

On the one hand, Alex had every right to have a normal life, and more than deserved it. If she wanted to walk away, and thought she could, more power to her. And selling out was a weird concept applied to this. In fact, she had no idea how Claire came to that conclusion. Maybe she meant denial? But this whole thing was a no win scenario - go have a normal life, but maybe get blindsided by some evil bastard. Live as a hunter, and definitely get blindsided by an evil bastard. They were all on borrowed time, and they should do what they wanted. She had told them this, but had no idea if it had sunk in. 

Claire had wanted to know if she had made any headway with the case, and Jody bored her with technical details about calling the police department in Fredricksen, getting a canvas under way of the houses on Elm Street, and never mentioned the barn or the coma outbreak. Claire was definitely going to find out about all of it, but Jody wanted to put it off for as long as possible. It was a Friday - Claire could at least pretend to go to school for one more day. 

Once the girls were gone, she finished eating the toast she’d forced herself to eat - the night shift coffee tore through empty stomachs like a buzz saw - and then went upstairs, to look at the books in her closet.

Six months after Bobby died, Jody had come home to find a huge box on her porch, with no return address, or sign of who it had come from. After briefly considering calling out the bomb squad, she opened it, to find a neat stack of books and some tchotchkes, clearly salvaged from Bobby’s burned out house. Also possibly a secondary storage area, because not all the books had a faint smell of smoke. She guessed Sam and Dean had sent it to her, and it made her wonder several things, including how long they must have been sifting through the ashes to find anything worth salvaging. Also, she wondered how much they’d kept for themselves, because they must have. 

She never told them that Bobby had told her several stories, about them as kids, about John, their father - and oh boy, Bobby probably skewed things a bit, but if Jody ever met him, she would have been tempted to just beat the ever loving fuck out of him. 

But Bobby was the second, and probably most important, Dad. They loved him, and he absolutely loved them. Which is why she never confirmed they sent the box, because talking about Bobby had a tendency to make them all very sad. But it was kind of them to share it with her. 

Jody had considered putting some of the safer books - ones without nasty spells, or descriptions of certain types of demons or monsters that would give anyone nightmares - on the bookshelves downstairs, but ultimately she found them too sad to even look at, so she kept them in a smaller, more manageable box, shoved into the back of her closet. She pulled it out, and started looking through them until she found one that might be helpful. Bobby kept detailed notes, although often with quite a bit of profane personal commentary to weed through. For the most part, she found it delightful. 

To say there were a lot of possible things that could have done this was an understatement. She quickly read fifteen pages, and found nearly fifteen things that might be responsible. She was torn about concentrating more on the coma thing, or the sacrifice thing. She settled on coma, because sacrifice opened the door even wider. She’d be reading and making lists for a thousand years. 

The problem as she saw it was narrowing the list down until the culprit became obvious. This was how it was with most investigation. The key to all of it was what did they get out of this. Was the coma thing related to how this thing fed? What were they taking from the victims? 

  
When her phone rang, it made her jump. Jody knew she could get lost in an investigation, but that was ridiculous. She gave herself a moment to get over it before answering. “Mills,” She said, closing the book.

“Hey Sheriff, it’s Anderson,” Officer Talia Anderson said, as if Jody didn’t recognize her voice. “Thought you might want to know we turned up some security camera footage on Elm, that kind of caught the car.”

“Fantastic.” 

“But, uh ... I don’t know if it’s all that helpful. It’s weird.”

Jody expected nothing less. “It’s okay. Meet you at the station.” She hung up, and put the book on her nightstand.

Maybe now she’d have something tangible to work with. 

**

School was really dumb. A total waste of her time. 

Claire hated cliques most of all. Jocks, cheerleaders, chess club - what did any of this matter? Any day they could be killed by something that they didn’t even know existed. It was hard to think anything was important in the face of a near constant apocalypse. Some days she just wanted to stand up and scream, “ _ You idiots are all going to die! Who cares who you’re dating?”  _ Which would probably get her considered crazier than she already was.

She was considered the school “head case”, she knew it, and she knew Alex was happily part of that group. Claire honestly didn’t care that people thought she was crazy, because in general they left her alone. But it still bugged her, and she hated that it did. 

When lunch rolled around, she decided to ditch and go see if she could find some evidence Jody’s people might have overlooked on Elm. Or maybe she should go to the impound lot and see if there were any clues in the Impala? Hmm. Which was the better bet?

Claire checked her phone, wondering if Castiel had come to heal the Winchesters and not even said anything to her. Was that possible? It didn’t seem so last time, but who knows, maybe he had adopted a more hard nosed attitude. Did that make her sad or not? She wasn’t sure. Just like she wasn’t sure how she felt about Sam and Dean being down for the count, until she tried to imagine their funeral, and couldn’t. It made her stomach tie itself up into a concrete knot. She only felt better once she decided not to think about it. 

She put her phone back, and was cutting across the back field of the school, when she was intercepted by Unity Burke. 

The unfortunately named Unity was one of the older sisters of Hope Burke, who Claire saved from the Sawyer house last night. As far as she knew, Unity didn’t go to the Sawyer house, but her older sister, Charity, did. Unity was also one of the goth/punk kids. She dyed her hair the deepest black money could buy, dyed the tips cotton candy pink, and generally wore weird clothes and really thick eyeliner every day. Today, Unity was rocking a very parochial plaid skirt, paired with torn fishnet tights and purple boots, and a Babymetal t-shirt. A metal band, sure, but because they were both Japanese and odd, the punk side seemed to allow it. Unity completed the look with a red plastic raincoat. 

Claire had also run into Unity a couple of times randomly, because she and her goth buddies liked to hang out at cemeteries, where Claire sometimes had to go to put down a ghost. She did wonder if Unity thought they were friends, because she did act that way at school. “Hey Claire, I wanted to thank you for helping Hope last night.”

Claire sighed. “Yeah, but tell your other sisters to stay the hell away from the Sawyer house. It’s not a joke. The ghosts there are angry and can’t rest.”

“Oh, I know.”

She had started to walk on, but Unity saying that made her stop. “You do?”

Unity nodded, and messed up her shaggy hair. It was funny how some girls could spend hours fixing up their hair, and in one minute it could completely collapse. “I passed by that place once, and you could feel the evil. Charity makes fun of me for it, but I know what I felt.”

It was hard to say if this was real, or more of Unity’s spooky punk goth cosplay. “If you sense evil, why do you hang out in cemeteries?”

“Because most of the dead aren’t evil, just lonely. I get it.”

Again, Claire couldn’t tell if she was being honest, or just making shit up. She seemed sincere, but anyone could seem that way. “Okay, cool. I gotta thing I gotta get to -“

“Do you know what that thing was last night?”

“What thing?”

Unity shrugged, idly scratching her neck. She had some kind of skin condition that left her neck looking a little scaly and flaky, which was why she was the outcast of the Burke sisters. They were generally considered pretty, but everybody made fun of Unity as the ugly one. She wasn’t ugly - she simply had a condition most found unsightly. Teenagers could be the absolute fucking worst sometimes. “I dunno exactly. I guess it was around three AM? I got this weird feeling that something really evil had come into town, or was nearby, or something. It woke me up. I mean, I thought maybe it was because Hope got stuck in the Sawyer house, but it seemed a lot stronger than that.”

Around three? Claire would have thought this was a deliberate gag, but there was no way she could have known about the Winchesters. If she listened to a police scanner, maybe she’d hear about the abandoned car ... but why would a seventeen year old girl listen to a police scanner at three in the morning? Okay, Claire might, but she knew she was different. “This evil ... if you came near it again, would you know?”

She both shook her and shrugged, a mixed message at best. “I dunno. I would think so.”

It was possible she could be psychic, as some of those were apparently real. It was also possible she wasn’t completely human. There were a lot of things that could be in play here. And Claire still couldn’t completely rule out all of this being a well crafted hoax or a trap. But since she and Jody had nothing to go on, what did she have to lose? “What would you say about ditching school and helping me find that really evil bastard?”

Her eyes widened in shock, but when Unity smiled faintly at the thought of being included in anything, Claire knew she had her. 


	3. Paint It Black

**_ 3 - Paint It Black _ **

The camera only caught a sliver of the road, maybe a fourth of it, at the very top of the screen. The lighting was also bad, as it looked nearly black and white, although it was theoretically in color. It was still the best footage available. 

The Impala entered the screen from the left, while another vehicle, a black truck, suddenly blocked the road on the right. The Impala stopped almost on a dime, which was crazy, but Jody assumed, simply from seeing the interior, that Dean poured a lot of love into that car. You wouldn’t think an oldie like that could have anti-lock brakes, but she’d seen weirder things. 

Although it was hard to make out any people, Jody could tell Sam was slumped against the passenger side door as soon as the car came to a stop. She saw zero of Dean, until he collapsed like a stone to the asphalt, where his right arm and the gun he was holding barely came into view. 

And this is where things got weird.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” Anderson said. She was acting like it was her fault the security camera was more concerned with the Wilson’s driveway. “They did say the neighbor’s wi-fi set up sometimes interferes with the recording.”

Did that make sense? Jody didn’t think so, but right now she didn’t care. It looked like a pair of legs walked up to Dean. A pair of legs wreathed in black smoke - or made of black smoke? - until they suddenly solidified into human looking legs, wearing black pants. She looked as closely as possible, to make sure it wasn’t a trick of the bad lighting, but there was no way in hell it was. Bad lighting wouldn’t cause shadows to move and coalesce like that. A human looking hand reached down and took the gun, while a wiry, human looking man got into the car and stole Sam’s laptop. She couldn’t see a face, but she felt she would know that long, scraggly dishwater blond hair if she saw it again. 

They returned to the truck, which drove away, leaving the Impala - and Sam and Dean - for anyone to find. “I’m just sorry we didn’t get a plate,” Anderson said.

“Or a make on the truck,” Jackson, Anderson’s partner, said. “Though I think it’s a Road Ranger.”

“Put out an APB on a black truck with Colorado or Nebraska plates,” Jody said. 

Both her officers gave her confused looks. “How did -” Anderson began.

“Just do it,” she said, giving them her most no-nonsense look. They both recognized it, nodded, and left her office. 

Jody sat back with a slow sigh. “What the fuck were you thinking, Dean?” She had so many questions.

Were they following the truck? No matter how many cars they kept between themselves and the truck, they would most likely be noticed. There weren’t a lot of old black Impalas on the road, not to mention an old black Impalas in racing shape with superior brakes.

Or, were they ambushed? That felt a little more likely, as she couldn’t believe Dean would be that dumb, especially with his beloved car. The first thing she thought when she saw that leg of black smoke was demon. But demons weren’t made of black smoke - that was just the form they took when they possessed people. And bullets would do nothing against a demon anyway, which Dean knew better than most. Unless he didn’t know he was dealing with a demon, or they were special bullets - could she rule that out? 

Oh hell, what could she rule in? Her mind stuck on demon and wouldn’t let go. But if it was a demon, it was a special one. Those apparently existed. From what she read in Bobby’s notes, apparently some “higher demons” were even immune to holy water, and could only be killed or banished in very specific ways. If this were a special, higher demon, how could she determine which one it was, and what would kill it? 

Damn it. Her first impulse was to call Sam and ask him for help. But that was off the table. She was going to have to hit Bobby’s books again and find it. Which was so easy when she had almost nothing to go on. Except for black smoke, which was the hallmark of almost all demons. 

Jody was honestly tempted to smash her head on her desk. She was pretty sure no one could see her, and even if they did, fuck it. She was the Sheriff. She could act like a big weirdo if she wanted. It wouldn’t even be the first time. 

Time to hit the books. And just as she was wondering if she should head home and take the rest of the day off, her office phone rang. “Sheriff Mills,” she said briskly. If this was some citizen calling to complain about their neighbor, she was going to lose her shit. 

“Hello, Sheriff, I’m Sheriff Mac Thompson, Fredricksen PD,” a man with an aw shucks, folksy type of voice replied. Out of long experience, she was wary of men that sounded like that. They usually thought it covered for many sexist and racist things. 

“Hello Sheriff, I was wondering if I could talk to you about the Adam Mabry case.”

There was a stretch of silence so long, she could hear a crackle of static on the line. He was using a cell phone. “Why?”

“It may have a connection to an assault case here. Can you tell me what happened on the night of the twenty seventh?”

She heard a noise in the background, like a car door shutting. “Listen, you do not want that,” he said, voice lowered, all fake folksiness gone. 

  
“I do, that’s why I’m asking.”

“The things there ... I had three officers quit on me because they couldn’t live with what they saw. One killed himself.”

Okay, that was ... a bit more than she was expecting. “The reports I’ve read on it seemed to say the fire burned up most of the evidence.”

“It did, but that doesn’t change the fact ...” he trailed off.

“What?” Jody prompted, wondering if she was ready to hear what he might tell her. 

After another long pause, where she heard nothing but his breathing in the background, he said, in a small, strangled voice, “They were all kids.”

No, she wasn’t ready. “What?”

“The victims in the barn,” he said, sounding congested. He was either crying or trying not to cry - the effect was the same. “Coronor guesses the youngest was around seven, and the oldest seventeen. They were burnt beyond recognition, and their ... their skulls were smashed. He doesn’t know if it was before the fire or after.”

Oh shit. Her sacrifice hunch had been right, but this was far worse than anything she could have imagined. Her first impulse was to slam the phone down so she didn’t have to picture any of this, but it was too late. “And you haven’t identified any of them?”

“How can you when all you have is charred flesh and shattered bones?” He made a choked sobbing noise, and it almost sounded like a retch.

Holy shit. What kind of evil, sadistic thing could have been summoned with such a brutal sacrifice? She was caught between nausea and fury. That fucker was going to have to pay. Slow, hard, and nasty. Could she draw and quarter him? She’d have to look up how to do that, but she wanted that option on the table. When she finally spoke again, she’d pitched her voice to match his. “What’s Mabry’s connection to all of this?”

Thompson sniffed. “We don’t know. We don’t even know if he was in coma before or after the ... whole thing. He was a bachelor farmer. Where does Satanic child killings come into any of this?”

Which added a wrinkle to all of this. Maybe he wasn’t the cause. Maybe he was as much a victim as those poor children. But right now there was no way to tell. 

  
And how convenient was it that everybody who knew something about this was dead, in a coma, or was like Thompson here, a complete wreck?

This case felt even more urgent. Not only were Sam and Dean on borrowed time, but maybe the city was. And the world? 

Now more than ever, Jody wished Bobby was here. 

**

Claire kind of understood why Unity was nervous. But on the other hand, was her punk wardrobe all style, no substance? Breaking into a place was totally sticking it to the man. 

Well, kind of breaking in. Since her “mom” was the Sheriff, Claire knew a few things about the impound lot. Like, where there was a tear in the fence no one had noticed or cared to fix, and when Phil, the normal impound guy, went on his lunch break. Okay, all of this took a certain amount of danger out of the process, but Claire didn’t think getting busted would play well with Jody after last night. And, in spite of the safety of it all, Unity was anxious. Claire was beginning to think the punk stuff was all for show. 

“What if we get caught?” Unity whispered, for the third time, as they made their way through the cars. Unity was ducking, but Claire already knew there was no need. Even if she was caught, being the Sheriff’s “daughter” was a get out of jail free card. She would do her best not to abuse it, because Jody might pull it, but it was a nice thing to fall back on. 

“Just do what I tell you and we won’t,” Claire said. The wind kicked up, and it was bitingly cold. She knew the winters here were kind of mental, but surely it was too far into spring for snow, right? She shrunk inside her leather jacket, and wished it was warmer. She needed to add some layers. 

The Impala stood out in the lot, mainly because it was like twenty or thirty years older than any other car there. Claire did have a brief moment of panic - what if the doors were locked? 

But then she tried the passenger side door, and it opened easily. Normally, when a car was brought in to impound, they didn’t bother to check if the doors were locked. And who would care? These were either abandoned cars, cars with way too many parking tickets, or evidence in a crime. There might be people stupid enough to try and steal a car from impound, but they weren’t getting very far. 

“Why are we looking in this car?” Unity asked.

“Told you about my friends, right? This is their car. I just wanna make sure they didn’t leave anything important in here.” She’d told Unity their car broke down and was towed in - it seemed better than saying they were monster hunters in suspicious comas. 

Unity wandered over to the driver’s side, still looking around like she expected to get busted any moment. “What does important look like?”

Claire shrugged. “I think you’ll know it when you see it.” She opened the glove compartment, and something rolled out and fell on the floor. She was expecting a weapon or something, but it was just a single bullet. Why the fuck did they have a loose one? Someone got sloppy. She slipped it in her pocket, and looked at the gun in the compartment. Didn’t look like it was compatible. Double sloppy. Were they starting to lose it in their old age?

“Uh,” Unity said. “I found this under the driver’s seat.” She was holding a massive hunting knife like it was a violent rat she had by the tail. 

“Put it back. It’s normal.”

“It is?” she asked, horrified. “What kind of friends are these?”

“Dangerous ones.” It was hard to see anything under the seats, but she blindly reached in, hoping she didn’t put her hand in a cold fry or moldy bun. Claire was glad that never happened. 

There was nothing under the passenger seat worth of note, except for a discarded ballpoint pen and a loose penny. She’d moved on to looking in the backseat, when Unity whispered harshly, “We gotta go.”

Claire looked up, looking for Phil, or maybe Carlos, who occasionally came in off shift. But she didn’t see them. “I don’t see anybody.”

Unity had already run over to her side of the car, and grabbed her by the arm. “No, we hafta go now,” she insisted. 

Claire was ready to pull her arm away and bite her head off, but she instantly noticed how hollow-eyed and pale Unity was. It made the rash on her neck stand out like a tattoo. “Is it the evil thing?” Claire asked. Could they be so lucky? 

Unity was shivering. Claire wasn’t sure it was from the cold. “It’s an evil thing. Not the evil thing, but something close to it.”

Huh? There was more than one? Claire wondered what the difference was, but she heard the sound of a chain-link fence rattling, Like someone was climbing up it. 

“Shit. Come on.” Claire closed the door and drew Unity along with her, until they found a nice, huge minivan with tinted windows to duck behind. The window tint was dark, but not so dark Claire couldn’t see through it. Also, who the fuck tinted a minvan? 

Unity was ducked down low, behind the rear tire, and grabbing on to Claire’s arm so tightly she bet she’d have bruises later. Claire kept as low as she could while still keeping an eye out on things, and at the last second turned the side mirror to give her a safer view.

It was just one man, tall and scrawny, in ratty jeans and a blue t-shirt, with a grimy denim jacket on top of all of it. He looked kind of like a meth head, although she couldn’t see his teeth to confirm that. He was also humming something tuneless, and his fingers occasionally twitched. He made a beeline towards the Impala.

What the hell ..? If there was more than one bad guy, maybe he was here to do exactly what Claire had been doing. But ... this guy helped take down the Winchesters? He had to be non-human, because otherwise either of them could have broke this guy in half with one arm tied behind their backs. 

He opened the door and started crawling over the seats, in a way that would’ve pissed Dean off if he had any idea. He was now singing something, but she couldn’t really hear what it was. It still sounded tuneless, whatever it was. In fact, it almost sounded like chanting, but chanting with nonsense words, loose syllables that had nowhere to go.

Now Claire was starting to remember who this guy reminded her of. Killer Bob from Twin Peaks. That was not a great mental connection to make right now. 

“Hey,” Phil shouted, walking through the lot. “Who the hell are you?”

Wannabe Bob stepped out of the Impala, and pointed his finger and thumb at Phil like it was a gun. “Pop goes the cerebrum,” Bob said, and pulled the trigger. Phil dropped like he had actually been shot in the head.

Claire put a hand over her mouth to keep from making a noise. What the fuck ..?! He had to be inhuman. But if he was, it was more than possible he knew they were here.

Oh, what a bad time to leave the angel sword at home. She knew she should have dropped by the house to get it first. She had a knife, but it was a small, stupid one, that probably wouldn’t do anything to him. 

Sure she would be quiet now, Claire pulled her phone out of her pocket, and texted 9-1-1 to Jody. Hopefully she’d send out the SWAT team. 

Now all they had to do was stay alive until she showed up. 


	4. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

**_ 4 - Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now _ **

After getting off the phone with the ruined Sheriff of Fredricksen, Jody needed a minute to gather her thoughts, and attempt to clear her head of murdered children with caved-in skulls. It didn’t work. The more she tried not to think about it, the more she did. She really needed to focus on something else. 

Okay - she ran the footage of the leg of smoke becoming an actual leg through her memory. Still weird; would never not be weird. But that was the monster she was hunting. She needed to get a grip, hunt it down, and make it stop. Hard to hurt anyone if its head was blasted into a million pieces. Her pocket buzzed as her personal cell went off, and she pulled it out, surprised she was getting a text message. Had Alex forgotten a book or something?

But the text was from Claire. It was only  _ 9-1-1. _

Her heart plummeted into her stomach. Claire rarely texted her; she certainly had never texted her for help. So she skipped out on school again, did she? Even though she told her the thing that took down the Winchesters was still out there ...

Oh fuck. She went to look for it, didn’t she? Did she find it, or did it find her?

She had an agreement with the girls. If they wanted her to pay for their phones, they had to keep a tracker app on them. Claire had taken it off once, and Jody had made her pay her own bill. She didn’t ask a lot, but she needed a way to know where they were if everything went apocalypse-ish. A quick check showed Claire had kept it on her phone this time - and she was at impound. Sure, yeah, she went to check out the Impala. Goddamn it.

She walked out to the bullpen, and said, “We have a situation at the impound lot. I need all officers in the field to respond to it now. And go in hot. Suspect is armed and extremely dangerous.”

Her people looked startled, but hopped into action. Addy at dispatch relayed her message to the officers on patrol, as Jody quickly went and put on a bulletproof vest, grabbed a radio and a tactical shotgun, and went to her truck. No, it wasn’t police standard, but fuck it. One of her daughters was in trouble, and there was some kind of intangible monster on the loose. Fuck protocol.

The impound lot wasn’t far, only a seven minute drive, but Jody put pedal to the metal and made it in five. Snow flurries were starting to come down, a bit out of season but still predictable, and that threatened to make traffic worse. But her focus was purely on making sure Claire was safe, and she didn’t care about anything else. Chen and Fields were here already, and she took the lead, signaling they should follow her. There weren’t going to be any more dead kids on her watch. 

She raised the shotgun, which was locked and loaded, as she entered the impound lot. It wasn’t the biggest one she’d ever seen, but there were enough places to hide if you wanted to. She tried to keep her vision open, watching for the slightest movement, which the flurries were now making difficult. 

And she didn’t kid herself into thinking the shotgun would actually kill the thing, but if any part of it was tangible, the shotgun would at least give it a memorable slap. It put grapefruit-sized holes in anything, and kicked like a mule on steroids. 

Then she came across the body of Phil Herndon, the impound attendant. She knelt down and checked for a pulse. It was there, but it was distressingly slow, giving her a Dean flashback. Shit. That monster was here. If it had done this to Claire ...

“Jody!” Claire exclaimed, and came out from behind a minivan. There was another girl with her, cowering beside her. One of the Burke girls? “He just left. I don’t know if he found what he was looking for or what.”

Jody signaled to Chen and Fields they should search the lot, as Jody lowered her shotgun and let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Are you all right?”

Claire nodded, as did the Burke girl. “Yeah. If he knew we were here, he didn’t care. Maybe we were beneath his notice.”

“You saw him.” Not a question.

“Yeah, but he looked like a dirtbag meth head. Long hair, denim on denim -“

“Dishwater blond hair, kind of greasy?” Jody asked.

Claire nodded. “You’ve seen him before?”

“He was on the security footage, taking Sam’s laptop.” So he was the monster’s best pal? Awesome. 

Claire looked at her hopefully. “There’s security footage?”

“Come on, let’s get you out of here,” she said, taking Claire’s elbow and steering her towards her truck. She squeezed her shoulder radio and called in an ambulance for Phil. Now she had three people she needed to save. 

As soon as they were all inside the truck, Jody asked, “How did he knock out Phil?”

“Oh, that’s the craziest thing. He made a finger gun, and shot it.”

“What?” Somehow, she hadn’t expected that. 

Claire shrugged. “That’s it. I mean, I guess he’s not human, but why pick such a terrible meat suit?”

“Not human?” the Burke girl piped up from the back seat. “There are non-human things?”

Jody looked back at the girl, who was still shivering, and honestly didn’t look well. She was way too pale. Jody hoped she wasn't going into shock. “What’s your name?”

“Unity.”

Right. The one with the terrible name. Why would parents do that to a kid? It seemed cruel. “Unity, I will answer your questions, but right now I need to gather the intel we have. I’ll tell you back at the station, okay?”

She nodded, and hugged herself as she sat back against the seat. Jody wondered how much of the truth she could actually take today. 

Jody looked out at the lot, but both Fields and Chen had come back from their search, and shrugged. Nothing to see. The danger was gone. Jody spoke into her shoulder radio, and called the alert off. Honestly, she should be counting her blessings. Claire wasn’t hurt, and the monster wasn’t spoiling for a fight. Yet. She wondered if there’d be any notice when it changed its mind, and if she’d know how to fight it by then. 

Now that the fear was gone, anger was starting to pour in. Jody wanted to erupt at Claire, and her dangerous recklessness, which could have landed her and Unity in one of those death comas, and what the hell was thinking? Was she even thinking? She bet not.

Jody grabbed onto the steering wheel, and made herself take a deep breath. She was not going to lose her shit in front of Unity. She was going to wait until she and Claire were somewhere private, and then she was going to rip her a new one. 

The drive back to the station was tense and quiet. and the snow now coming down in a steady fall was probably making it worse. As soon as they arrived, Jody passed Unity off to Laurie, who was great with traumatized kids, and marched Claire straight back to her office. As soon as she closed the door, Jody asked, “Do I really have to say it?”

Claire sighed, and Jody imagined the eye roll that went with it. “I only went to see if your guys missed something when they searched the Impala. I didn’t think one of those creeps would show up.”

Jody turned, and fixed her with a stare that would have made rookies piss themselves. But it barely registered with Claire. “My guys? I searched it. One look at the trunk and we’d have the Feds crawling up our ass. But that wasn’t what I was going to say and you know it.”

“I didn’t go alone.”

Her playing dumb was starting to piss her off even more. “Yes, dragging a civilian into this shitshow was a masterstroke.”

“But she’s not a civilian. I mean, she kinda is, but she’s psychic. She was telling me how she felt this great evil come in at three in the morning, and she knew when that guy arrived as well. I think maybe she could help.”

Jody rubbed her eyes, and counted to ten in her mind. It wasn’t working. ”Be that as it may, I asked you not to do something stupid while these monsters are on the loose, and you did something stupid. Don’t you care that you could’ve ended up as comatose as Sam and Dean and Phil? And what if Unity got hit? What were you planning to do then?”

Claire plopped down in the chair in front of her desk, maybe so she didn’t have to look Jody in the eyes anymore. “I didn’t think one would just show up. I’d have brought my sword if I thought that was gonna happen.”

Jody went around to her side of the desk. “And if this guy can drop bodies at fifty feet away, what good will the sword be? Dean had a gun, and he still didn’t win.”

Claire shrugged and looked down at her hands. Jody was still furious at her, but was aware, somewhere, she probably had the best of intentions. But that didn’t really matter, did it? Good intentions could get you killed as quick as bad ones. 

Claire looked at her, her eyes full of misery. “You can’t ask me not to do anything. I ... I hate feeling helpless, okay? It’s the worst. And if I don’t do anything, and they die ... I’m gonna feel like it’s kinda my fault. Because I didn’t do anything to try and stop it.”

“You know that’s ridiculous.”

“Logically, yeah. But emotions aren’t exactly logical.”

Jody sat down in her chair, resting her hands on her desk. “You getting yourself killed helps no one.”

“I wasn’t trying to. I -“

“Do you really think Sam and Dean planned on being in death comas? No one plans for it unless they’re suicidal or psychic. But putting yourself out there with no back up and no plan is a good way to make it happen faster.” 

Claire frowned, but she looked miserable. Jody didn’t think she was faking it for sympathy. This whole situation, top to bottom, was miserable. “Look, if you want to help, you can help me.”

Claire perked up a bit. “Really?”

“Yeah. I have to go through Bobby’s books to figure out what we’re dealing with, and an extra pair of eyes is always useful.”

She sagged in her chair. “Reading?”

“If you want to be a hunter, it’s part of the job. You have to know what you’re fighting to properly fight it. But no more extra-curriculars, okay? Otherwise, I’ll slap an ankle monitor on you so fast.”

“You can’t. I haven’t committed a crime.”

“Uh, today alone, trespassing.”

She sat forward with a scoff. “Oh, come on ...”

“Don’t test me.” Claire crossed her arms over her chest and pouted, but that was good, because she knew she was beaten. “By the way, did that guy find anything in the Impala?”

“Not that I could tell.”

“Did you?”

Claire reached into the pocket of her jeans, and pulled out a small object she put on her desk: a single shiny bullet. “It fell out of the glove box, and it wasn’t even the right caliber for the gun in there.”

Jody picked it up. “Yeah. I just assumed it got unloaded from another gun. Or maybe it was a good luck charm or something.” Hard to say with the Winchesters. She put it in her pocket, and started making some phone calls. 

Much like she thought, the hospital confirmed Phil was in a coma of unknown origin, and there had been zero change in Sam and Dean’s condition. Which meant their angel friend hadn’t shown up? Huh. Jody had too much on her plate to give any mental space to that right now. Claire didn’t think it was good, though. 

She took the rest of the day off, and she and Claire dropped Unity off at home. The Burkes lived in one of the tonier suburbs, and Jody wondered why she had always thought they were kind of weird. She had no concrete thing she could use as an example, it’s just that they always seemed kind of snooty and removed from everyone else. Except for Unity, who had that whole awkward teenager thing down, so much so Jody felt kind of bad for her. 

They gave her the very bare bones “supernatural things exist in the world, but if you talk about it everyone assumes you’re crazy, and it’s kind of the worst” talk on the way there. She seemed to take it fairly well, although Jody was still half-convinced she was in shock. It was a lot to take, and the terrible thing? This was barely scratching the surface. 

By the time they got home, Alex was in the kitchen, doing her homework, and there was a half a foot of snow on the ground. It was too much to ask that the weather would cooperate. 

Jody and Claire went straight to her room, where Jody busted out the books. She took a bit of pity on Claire and handed her one of Bobby’s journals, as he had a casual voice that made you get invested in his writing quickly. Jody stuck to the old, more ponderous tomes that often used words that no longer had any meaning. It was best to read them with a thesaurus handy.

She ordered some pizza, and began skimming the pages, looking for anything remotely helpful. Jody began ignoring references to smoke, because it appeared too often to be a factor.

Jody was finishing off the last slice of pizza, wondering when it would be okay to give up for the night, when something caught her eye. Since she was skimming, it took her a moment to find what had triggered her to stop, but she did. “Oh hell,” she exclaimed. Claire, who was sitting on her bed, nose deep in the journal, finally looked up. 

“Find something?”

“There’s a so-called archdemon called Adramelech who was worshipped by burning children alive,” Jody reported, dropping the pizza on her plate. She was no longer hungry. In fact, she could feel it now curdling in her stomach.

“Adramelech?” Claire repeated, suddenly excited. She began flipping back the journal, page after page. “I think I saw that name.”

“You did?” You’d think if Bobby fought this archdemon, he would have mentioned it.

“Yeah,” Claire said. “There’s this whole section that Bobby said were notes from his talks with someone named Crowley? Apparently, if you give him a bottle of good scotch whiskey, he won’t stop talking.” At Jody’s look, she added, “It says that in the preface.”

Jody decided to trust her, and joined her on the bed, so she could look at Bobby’s neat but cramped handwriting. She found that kind of endearing. “Okay, here it is.” Claire bit her lower lip as she read the page. “He says Adramelech was Lucifer’s BFF, and kind of a clothes horse. But they had a falling out when Adramelech led a failed coup in Hell against Lucifer, for which he got thrown in the darkest pit of Hell. Crowley adds he probably isn’t much of a threat, because burning children went out with the Inquisition. And even if Adramelech showed up someday, just make him wear plaid, and he’d spontaneously combust in humiliation.”

Shit. It was a summoning ritual. Someone brought Adramelech back to Earth by burning children alive. Jesus. Who would be so evil, and so fucking stupid? “Beyond making him wear sensible fashion, is there anything on weaknesses or how to kill him?”

“Uh ... not on this page,” Claire admitted. “But I’ll keep reading.”

Jody checked the clock. It was late, but not as late as she thought it would be. “You don’t have to.”

“No, I don’t mind reading the Crowley interviews. Whoever he is, he’s funny, and more than a little bitchy. He spills the tea on everyone.”

Crowley was the King of Hell, wasn’t he? Maybe he still was. She had no idea. But she decided not to tell Claire that. 

Jody picked up her dusty tome, and turned to a paragraph on archdemons. Apparently they were considered the demon equivalent of archangels, meaning ridiculously powerful, and extremely hard to kill. This just kept getting better and better. Possibly immortal? Sure, why not? There had to be a little room left on the shit sandwich.

It was then the entire house shuddered.

It was fast, a roiling hit and then gone, but there was no mistaking it. A couple of pictures fell off the wall, but that was the extent of the damage. 

“Was that an earthquake?” Claire asked. 

“No, this was something else,” Jody said, and she went to her bedroom window, and despite the cold, opened it. Some snow fell in, but most had already been knocked off by the shudder. 

She looked out, the cold wind a bracing slap, and turning towards downtown, she saw it - a huge funnel of black smoke boiling into the sky, getting subsumed by the gray snow butts. 

Jody’s phone hummed in her pocket, and she pulled it out as sirens began filling the night. “Go for Mills.”

“Uh, I guess you felt that,” Sanchez said. “I’m not sure what the story is yet, but it seems the Red Rooster exploded.”

The bar? Why the hell would someone blow up a bar?

She had a very bad feeling this was somehow related to the archdemon in town. Goddamn it. 


	5. Play Dead

**_ 5 - Play Dead _ **

By the time Jody got there, the fire was mostly out. It helped that it was still snowing, and there wasn’t much left to burn. 

The Red Rooster was a local institution - she remembered it being around when she was a kid. And now it was a smoldering, brick-lined hole. Officer Allison Jones was on the sidewalk, putting up crime scene tape now that the firemen were retreating. “Please tell me this was closed for renovations,” Jody asked, not holding out hope.

She shook her head, looking appropriately somber. “No. All evidence points to this being a regular Friday night at the bar.”

Oh shit - it was Friday, wasn’t it? The bar would be packed. Yeah, that pizza was really starting to feel bad now, like a lead weight in her stomach. “Any survivors?”

Allison looked on the verge of tears, but managed to blink them back.”Not to my knowledge.”

The death toll here was going to be what? About two dozen or so? Three dozen? Christ. Jody wasn’t looking forward to talking to all those anguished families, aware that a demon killed their family members, and no justice would ever be served. “Does anyone have any idea how it happened?”

Allison shook her head again. Now done with the tape, she was putting her mittens back on. “No one. One of the firemen suspected maybe it was a gas leak, only I’m not sure the Red Rooster had any gas stoves or anything, did they?”

“Not to my knowledge.” She hadn’t been to this bar a lot, but it had never been trendy, gourmet, or in any way fancy. It was just a bar. You came here to get wrecked and watch basketball. 

Jody turned and gestured to all the businesses across the street. “You know what I’m gonna say, right?”

Allison nodded. Her nose was already pink from the cold. “Security camera footage.”

At least with so many businesses on the street, they were likely to get several better angles than they did on the WInchester drive by. But it didn’t make Jody any happier.

**

Unity had always had weird dreams.

Of course, everybody had weird dreams. But hers were kind of different. No matter what she’d read on the internet, she could taste in dreams. And smell, and touch. She got the full sensory experience. The weirdness, if it had stopped there, would have been great. But of course it didn’t.

It first happened when she was six. She had a dream she was at Great Aunt Margie’s place in California, which she had visited once. But she had a great place, really sunny, and she sent her fun Christmas presents. She had a tea party with Aunt Margie, who told her not to be sad, although Unity couldn’t figure out what there was to be sad about. But when Unity woke up, it was with the certainty that Margie was dead. She told her mother, who told her dreams weren’t real, they were make believe, and the phone rang while her mother was whipping up some oatmeal. The call was from their other Great Aunt, Dahlia, telling them Margie had died in her sleep. 

Her mother didn’t start looking at her funny until their Grandfather died, when Unity was eight. She had a cold at the time, pretty bad, and was a bit zonked out on cold medicine, so when she dreamed about playing gin rummy with grandad - a game he had taught her, although the reason for its name and several of its rules eluded her - Unity was willing to chalk it up to that. Even when, before she woke up, he gathered the cards together, and said to her, very clearly, “Tell them I want them to pull the plug.”

As it turned out, Grandad had suffered a stroke, and was in a coma. The doctors wanted Mom and Dad to make a decision on his continued care, and that’s when Unity told them what Grandad had said to her last night. That was when her mother started being afraid of her.

Well, maybe that was an overstatement. But when she went on to foresee the death of a cousin she really didn’t know in a car crash, and had a long conversation in her dreams with a girl at their school who had been hospitalized for leukemia - and lived, thankfully - Unity became aware she couldn’t keep reporting these things. Adults were weird about it, and kids were worse. Her own sister, Charity, accused her of being a witch, as if that was a thing you could actually be. It just really hurt that they all looked at her like she was a bomb about to go off. If she could stop doing it, she would. She didn’t know how she did it.

She tried taking sleeping pills for a while, but they didn’t work. She’d looked for dream suppressants on the web, but most of them didn’t work, or were vaguely poisonous. Unity simply got used to being considered a freak in her own family as well as at school, and never told anyone if she dreamed about their brother dying, or an industrial accident that killed someone’s dad. If people didn’t want to know, great. She wouldn’t tell them.

She felt she was on a good streak, though. It had been three months since she’d dreamed of talking with a real person. Sure, there was that feeling of evil that woke her up last night, but it was only a feeling. She didn’t talk to anyone.

But Unity knew when she was entering someone else’s headspace, or whatever she did when she talked to people. Again, it was surround sound - taste, smell, feeling, all of it. And her skin kind of prickled, like it had been asleep and was now waking up. It wasn’t completely unpleasant.

Which was how she knew she was moving into a conversation space. She seemed to be in a library, but not the Sioux Falls Public Library, which she knew fairly well. No, this place smelled a bit of dust and ... coffee? Also something oily. It wasn’t terrible, though.

But age permeated this place, and the layout was weird. She was pretty sure she was alone - could she move into someone’s headspace and completely miss them? - until she came out into a big room, which had a huge table and a large staircase headed up. She almost missed the man sitting at the table, looking through a book that appeared to be as thick as four or five textbooks put together. Unity didn’t recognize him at all. He had almost shoulder-length brown hair, and a laser-focused gaze that seemed to eat pages more than read them. He looked up at her suddenly and seemed surprised. “Uh, hello?”

Unity did a small hand wave, not getting any closer. With strangers, you had to take it slow. No one was ever sure what was real or how to react. In retrospect, it was like Margie and Grandpa knew how to do this, and had done it before. “Hi. Do you know where we are?”

He cocked his head at her curiously. “The bunker. Who are you?”

The bunker? Weird. This didn’t seem like a bunker. Well, there were those stairs going up. Maybe it was, but if so, it was the largest one she had ever seen. “I’m Unity Burke. Who are you?”

“Sam Winchester.” He looked around, as if unsure where he was, even though he’d just named it. “What’s going on?”

“Uh, it’s kind of hard to explain. I sort of just ... connect with people’s dreams sometimes. I don’t mean to, but it happens anyway.”

“Okay. Are you psychic?”

“I ... guess? I don’t really know.”

“You’re not a demon or an angel?”

Unity felt smacked in the face by that. “Angels exist? Jody and Claire told me demons existed, but they never mentioned angels.”

“Jody and Claire?” Sam suddenly jumped to his feet. He was really tall. “Right, we were headed to Sioux Falls.” He scratched his head as if confused. “What happened to us?”

Unity shook her head. “I don’t know. Sorry. You can’t remember?”

“No.” He was starting to look distressed, and she didn’t blame him. Maybe he had a head injury? Or maybe he was in a coma. Those two things could scramble someone’s brain something fierce. She once talked with a coma patient who couldn’t use words, but could only draw pictures. She was a good artist. “Okay, Dean and I were ... on the road.”

“Who’s Dean?”

“My brother. I’ve been waiting for him ...” Sam suddenly got this serious look on his face, like he’d figured something out and wasn’t thrilled by it. “Are you a reaper?”

“A what?”

“Am I dying or dead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve had conversations with people who died, but not after they’re dead.”

He sighed and nodded. “Okay, that’s something, I guess. Damn it, why can’t I remember?”

“Maybe if you were in a car accident, you hit your head,” she suggested. “That can make recall a lot harder.” She stepped closer to the big table. He didn’t seem dangerous. Mostly he just seemed bewildered. 

“Was I in a car accident?” He appeared to look down at the table, but she knew he was rifling through whatever memories were available to him, trying to piece his own story together. For some, it was easier than others. 

Even though she was in someone’s headspace, she really didn’t have access to what they did. It was like a dream was a neutral territory, one someone could step on if they only knew the way in. Which she did, although Unity had no idea how she knew it. Maybe it was like being born left-handed or something. She did get the sense she should help him if she could. “You said you were headed to Sioux Falls. Why? Do you remember that?”

“Uh ...” He sat on the edge of the table. He still seemed way too tall even sitting down. Some people got all the luck. Unity knew she was in for a life of always being called shrimp. Or freak. Freak shrimp? Now that sounded like a potato chip company’s worst idea ever. “Something bad ... was going to happen? Had already happened?”

“Is it related to the evil thing?”

He stared at her with a look she really couldn’t interpret. It was a variation of his intense, book devouring one. “Yes. It ... uh ... shit. I just about had it.”

“You’re monster hunters too, like Jody and Claire? You were hunting the big evil thing and the smaller evil thing?” She wished she had names to call them, but she didn’t right now. One felt so evil it was like the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow. And the other felt evil in the whole let’s kill all the puppies in the world way. Both bad, but there were degrees of magnitude. “Do you know how we stop them?”

He scrubbed a hand through his hair, starting to look disgusted with himself and his malfunctioning mind. “I did. I just can’t ... don’t let them see you.”

”What?”

“I just remembered. If they see you they can kill you. So stay out of their sight.”

Not super helpful, but maybe that explained why the long-haired guy didn’t attack them at the impound lot. He never saw them. “Anything else?”

He scowled at what must have been the half-empty cupboard of his brain. She sympathized, as she felt that way often, and she didn’t have a head injury to blame it on. “You need to find my brother. He might have pieces of information I don’t have.”

“I ... don’t know how to do that. I can’t control this. It just happens.”

He made a small noise, sort of like a scoff. “Oh yeah, I know that feeling.”

He did, didn’t he? “You’re psychic?”

“No. I used to be, kind of, but it wasn’t really natural.”

“What does that mean?”

He shook his head. “Long, ugly story. I don’t want to scare you off.”

“You wouldn’t.” Now she was intrigued. You could make someone psychic, even when they weren’t? Could she do it to Charity? She really deserved it, the bitch. 

  
Sam shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Just tell Jody and Claire to avoid them until they can get a plan of action together ...” He trailed off, and slowly frowned, his eyebrows dipping low. “Oh. They noticed us, didn’t they? That’s how we ended up here.” He paused briefly. “How long do we have?”

Unity hated to shrug, but she had no choice. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

Sam nodded, as if that was an answer of any substance, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Tell them to be careful. You too.”

Unity nodded, even though, if she had any choice in the matter, she wasn’t going anywhere near the evil thing. 

She wondered if she’d have any choice. 

**

Jody honestly didn’t care that she got some grumpy shop owners out of bed. There had been a mass murder, and she wasn’t dragging her heels. Most gave her duplicates of their security footage, or simply let her have access to their system.

She was sitting in her truck, watching it on a laptop, as people went through the rubble of the bar, looking fruitlessly for survivors. From what she could tell, they’d be lucky to find anything to identify the bodies with. The bar may have exploded, but the interior looked more like it had been vaporized. The fire department was at a loss to explain that. Jody wasn’t, but she wasn’t going to share. 

The convenience store across the street had the best footage, which wasn’t a surprise. It showed everything standard, a normal night at the bar, people coming and going, and then, without warning, the bar is swallowed in an eruption of fire. The front doors were blasted to toothpicks, and the windows atomized, explaining the notable lack of broken glass in the rubble. 

The flames were ferociously high, a red-orange tornado of flame, and after several seconds, a dark spot emerged. A dark spot that grew until it was a silhouette, and then became a man, as if frames of the film had been skipped between transition. He wore a dapper three-piece pinstriped suit, with a double-breasted vest and a watch chain hanging out of his pocket, a sleek black cane in his left hand. The flames did nothing to him, and he strode through them like it was a beautiful spring day. His eyes were blue and his face angular, although kind of attractive, until you saw the tiniest hint of a smile on his face as he walked out of the burning bar, swinging his cane, and walking nonchalantly down the street.

So that was Adramelech, huh? She thought he’d be taller. 


	6. Dead Men Tell No Tales

**_ 6 - Dead Men Tell No Tales _ **

Sleep was pretty much out of the question, but Jody took some pills and tried. In the end, she got about four hours, and felt unsettled and grumpy as hell. It was going to have to do, as she had a couple of monsters to hunt down. 

Then she went to the window, and saw two feet of snow on the ground. Goddamn it. This would fuck the whole day. Traffic would be a nightmare, and people would have questions about the explosion last night, questions she couldn’t answer. Part of her wanted to put out an APB on that steampunk asshole archdemon, but she couldn’t, could she? Because it would just get everyone killed. She didn’t need more death on her hands. 

Jody wasn’t hungry, but she decided to make some eggs, because beating a whole bunch of eggs always got some of her anger out. But then she had a a ridiculous amount of eggs, and she didn’t like them that much. But Alex and Claire usually ate them, so that was a good thing about having teenagers in the house. 

She had about two plates of scrambled eggs cooked already, when there was a small knock on the door. Since it was so early, she was kind of surprised, but figured maybe it was someone from the station. Probably everyone there knew someone at the Red Rooster last night. She probably did too, she just didn’t know yet.

She opened the door to find Unity standing there, so swaddled in a puffy parka, hat and scarf, Jody could only recognize her by her thick blue eyeliner. “Unity, should you be here?”

“Oh, my parents don’t care.”

Jody held the door open for her, and motioned her in from the cold. “I doubt that’s true.”

“No, I scare them,” she said nonchalantly, as she unwound her scarf. 

Jody didn’t even know what to make of that, so she decided to ignore it. “Hungry? I’ve got a whole bunch of eggs.”

“Oh, sure, if it’s not a problem.” She unzipped her jacket. “Do you know someone named Sam Winchester?”

Jody dropped the fork she just picked up. “Yes. Why?”

“He told me to tell you you can’t let them see you. If they can see you, they can kill you.”

Jody stared at her. Was she on the level here? “When did you talk to him?”

“Last night,” she said, taking a seat at the kitchen table. 

“At the hospital?”

“No, in my dreams. He’s in the hospital? That makes sense.”

She walked up to the table, and put her hands on it. Unity looked up at her. “You’re going to have to tell me all about this now.”

And Unity did. Claire wasn’t making up the psychic thing. Unity’s ability to be so matter of fact about it made her seem a little spooky, but also self-possessed. She seemed to be at peace with her abilities, and that was probably a blessing, all things considered. Couldn’t have been easy. 

But Jody couldn’t believe their luck. “You can talk to Sam. That’s great. Can I give you some questions to ask him?”

“Uh, it doesn’t work like that. He asked me to talk to his brother too, and I can’t do that either. What I do ... it’s unconscious. I have no control over it. I wish I did.”

Alex came downstairs, saw Unity, and took her scrambled eggs out to the living room. Was there some sort of school clique dynamic Jody was unaware of?

Oh, right. If Unity was considered weird to her family, she must have been considered even weirder by her fellow kids. Poor girl. 

Claire came down last, because she always did. She was generally the last to go to bed, and the last one up. The bright side of that was at least she was consistent. She got caught up quickly, and seemed more awake than usual. Jody joined them at the table, with her own plate of eggs, because she knew she had to get something down before hitting the coffee. 

“What if you were in the room?” Claire asked Unity.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, if you fell asleep in a chair in Sam’s room, or Dean’s. Would you be more likely to talk to them then?”

Unity thought about it, placing her fork gently on her plate. She had very good manners, for what it was worth. “I don’t know. I’ve never done that before.”

“You’re being a little presumptuous Claire,” Jody reminded her. It was great Unity could possibly talk to the Winchesters, but that was no reason to drag her into a fight that sound impossibly ugly. 

“It’s okay. If I can help, I’d like to,” Unity said. “And I can always sleep, especially if I have a swig of the good stuff.”

Jody raised an eyebrow at her. “A swig of the good stuff?”

“NyQuil,” she replied guilelessly. “Knocks me right out.”

“It knocks everyone out. It’s its whole point for existence.” Jody got up, and took her plate and Unity’s back to the kitchen. “But I feel a little weird asking for your help. This isn’t a fight for amateurs. No offense.”

“None taken. I really don’t want to have to fight anything,” Unity said. “But I can talk. I’m pretty good at that.”

“And how exactly do we fight these things while not letting them see us?” Jody said, finally allowing herself her first cup of coffee. Just smelling it made her feel more awake. “I mean, sniper rifle, sure, but that’s not gonna kill this Adramelech asshole.”

“Is there any way we could blind them?” Claire asked. What a grisly topic. “Throw lye in their face or something?”

Jody fixed her with a stern look as she resumed her seat at the table. “First of all, it worries me you even thought of that. And secondly, you’re thinking like he’s human. He’s not. I’m not sure we have anything that could even make a dent in him.”

“Holy water?” Claire asked.

Jody shook her head. “Archdemon. Means nothing to him.”

Unity suddenly perked up. “Hey, do you have one of those old cameras? With the big flash? My Dad has one, and it always blinds us when he takes a photo.”

Claire looked at her like she was mental, which was a feeling Jody shared, except maybe that wasn’t so stupid. If he wasn’t expecting it, it might be bewildering. “But even if that worked, it’d buy us maybe four seconds at best.”

“Dean would say that’s enough, if you use it correctly,” Claire said.

Jody set her mug down. “And this is why I don’t want you hanging around with Dean. I mean, yeah, he’s right, but we weren’t born with guns in our hands like the Winchesters. They could do it in their sleep. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

“By the way,” Unity said. “Why didn’t you guys tell me angels were a thing?”

Claire sighed. “Because angels are straight up dicks. Well, I know one that’s kinda okay. But otherwise they’re demons with a different name.”

Harsh, but Jody knew, from Claire’s perspective, that had always been the case.

Jody knew, as much as she was putting it off, she had to go in and start alerting the families of loved ones who had died inside the Red Rooster, if they could positively identify anyone. It was going to be a long, sad, ugly day. And that was before you factored in she was going to have to think of some way to defeat an evil being who was way above her pay grade, and she only had forty eight hours left. 

Yeah. This day was going to suck.

**

Unity was not crazy about lying to people, especially doctors. So she let Claire do all the lying.

She played along as the daughter of Sam Winchester, so she could visit her “dad” and “uncle”. The nurse at the front desk seemed skeptical at first, but Claire sold it well, and soon they were past the front desk. Only then did Unity take her first swigs of NyQuil.

NyQuil honestly tasted terrible, but in her trials with sleep stuff, she discovered this put her out fast, and it didn’t prevent her from walking around in someone else’s mind. Of course, nothing stopped that, but she held out hope that one day, she would find something. 

Was this wrong? Unity honestly wasn’t sure. Jody had told Claire not to do anything stupid, and she wondered if this qualified. Claire insisted it was the opposite, that Jody knew what they were planning and it was okay. Unity wasn’t sure about that, but okay. It wasn’t like she had something better to do. 

Still, it was weird going into a stranger’s hospital room. Dean was in a coma, so it was hard to say fairly, but he didn’t look much like Sam. Then again, how much did Hope look like Charity? Or her, for that matter? Genetics was weird.

Of course, Unity didn’t know if this would work, or if it did, which brother she’d end up talking to, as Sam was right next door. Technically, she was within range of both. But, if she ended up talking too Sam again, at least she had some questions she could ask. 

The chair in his room wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but when she started feeling this heavy warmth in her limbs, she knew the cold medicine was taking over, and it wouldn’t matter. On NyQuil, she could probably sleep on a bed of nails. She just hoped she didn’t wake up with a crick in her neck.

Also, she was a little nervous, because Claire warned her Dean’s mindscape might be pretty raw. Apparently, he had done some violent things, and was possessed by a demon until recently? Or something like that. Unity wondered if Claire had deliberately waited until she had already drunk the cold medicine to tell her that. Seemed rude.

But Unity didn’t worry too much. Yes, she had all her senses in a headspace, but also, nothing could really hurt her. She had the power to pull the plug on it at any time. How she wasn’t sure, but it seemed as instinctual as all the rest of it. Something she was somehow born knowing. 

She braced herself for war zones or post-apocalyptic landscapes, and hoped to find herself in the bunker again, but was surprised when she found herself in a lush green forest. It was a warm day, pleasant, the surroundings pretty, and while she liked walking through it, she braced herself for something awful popping up. Zombies maybe? Or demons, although she wasn’t a hundred percent clear on what they looked like. 

But she made it to the forest’s edge, and saw a modest sized lake, with a small and weathered dock. There was no one here. Much like the whole thing with the bunker, she was afraid she’d crossed into a headspace where the person simply wasn’t. 

She walked a little further, until she came to the head of the dock, and saw a small pile of clothes near the end of it. Finally she saw the person, face up and floating in the water. He had short brown hair, and a strange pentagram tattoo near his collarbone He was mostly undressed, having apparently stripped down to black boxer briefs, but Unity was happy for small favors. At least he wasn’t skinny dipping. 

“Hello,” Unity said.

He opened his eyes, sinking down into the water and looking at her. He seemed really startled. “Oh, hi.” He started swimming back.

He grabbed on to the end of the end of the dock and his head popped up. “Hey, is this your lake? Sorry. The fish weren’t biting, and I figured what the hell? Been a while since I’ve gone swimming.”

Oh, he thought this was real. Yeah, she ran into this quite a bit too. “Um, no. This isn’t reality.”

“What?”

“Hi, my name is Unity Burke, and I’m a psychic, I guess. Anyway, it seems a demon named Adramelech somehow put you and your brother in a coma? Jody and Claire sent me, to see if I could talk with you. Sam asked me too.” She wondered if the fact that Sam had been psychic at some point -?- made him realize he wasn’t alone immediately, and that he had to be in some kind of altered state. 

She saw it in sink in with Dean, and now she could see the family resemblance between him and Sam. He had that same laser focus, only instead of aiming it at books, he aimed it at everything else. He glanced down at the pier as he considered her words, and then hauled himself up. “Son of a bitch. He figured it out.”

“Sam?”

“Adramelech. How is Sam?”

“Okay, considering.”

He nodded, his back to her as he shrugged on his shirt. He had a patchwork of ghostly scars on his back, and she wondered what those were from, and if he had them in real life. The human mind was a hell of a thing, and sometimes people’s interior vision of themselves didn’t match the exterior. For instance, her Grandpa was in his early forties when they played their last game of gin rummy, and she hadn’t been alive when he was that age. She’d seen some photos, though, so at least she could place him. 

He stood pulling on his jeans at roughly the same time. A neat trick that told her he was used to getting dressed fast. What kind of life did they lead? “Sam told us if he could see us he could kill us, but he was having a hard time remembering anything else.”

“Uh ... yeah, I’m drawing some blanks too.” Dean turned around, frowning. He looked dry now, but again, the magic of being in a headspace. “I don’t remember ... how’d they get us?”

“Umm, I don’t know that part. Sorry.”

“Shit.” He was looking down at the dock, but she knew he was rifling through his memories, counting holes. 

She knew she needed to try and get him to remember something if he could. What was the point of chugging cold medicine otherwise? “Do you remember why you were coming to Sioux Falls?”

That made him look up at her. His intense gaze was almost uncomfortable. “We needed ... what did we need?”

Interesting. Sam had said it was because something bad had happened/was going to happen. Was there a bridge between these two different thoughts? “To stop something?”

Dean nodded faintly. “Him, to stop him.” After a moment, he snapped his fingers. “The sword. We needed the sword.”

“What sword?”

He stared at her blankly. “Uh ... I’m not sure.”

Well, at least it was more data to add to the pile. “Will the sword kill them?”

“Not alone, but yeah.”

“What else is necessary?”

He frowned, and looked off towards the woods. She looked too, just in case those monsters she was fearing popped up again, but no, it was still just trees. This was a lovely place. Was it real? Sometimes it was hard to say. “I’m drawing a blank. Damn it!”

Unity knew she should probably stick to the loose script she had, but she had a question neither Jody or Claire could answer, and maybe Dean was in the best position to do it. “Who’s that guy with Adramelech?”

“Renfield?” He rubbed his forehead. “Shit, what is he again? Sam figured it out ..”

“Renfield? That’s his name?”

“That’s what I call him. It was either that or Smithers.” Unity noticed he had a couple of ghostly scars on his face and neck, including one bisecting his lower lip, that she hadn’t seen on him in his hospital bed. So Dean’s subconscious thought he looked like a chewed up tomcat? Interesting. She had no idea what that meant exactly, but surely someone had a theory. “Parasite.”

“What?” Had she zoned out and missed something?

“That’s what Sam called it. He’s some kind of parasitic demon. He has ... something, shit. If he sees you he can put the whammy on you, and you die slow, because he’s leeching away your life force. It’s basically how he eats.”

“Ick. Do we need something special to kill him?”

“Nah. Ruby’s knife - it’s a blade with sigils cast into it in my coat - will do it, you just have to avoid him putting the whammy on you before you can stab him.” He paused, and scowled. “That’s how we’re dying, huh?Too bad I don’t have the mark anymore, ‘cause I’d make him choke.”

Unity had no idea what that was. Sounded ominous, though. 

Dean shook his head. “Jody and Claire really shouldn’t be fighting these bastards. They’re nasty pieces of work. But there’s no choice, is there?”

“Not really.”

“Jody probably knows this, but if you’re going to fight them, it can’t be together. You have to divide and conquer. They’re virtually unstoppable otherwise.”

Unity nodded. Sounded sensible. “Any idea how we do that?”

He considered that. “Not at the moment.” Suddenly he frowned, and looked down, muttering, “Is Amara going to allow me to die like this?”

“What?”

He made a dismissive motion with his hand. “Nothing. I’m ... I’ll be really surprised if I die. I don’t have the mark anymore, but I still have a bad luck anchor on me.”

Okay. There was oodles of back story she was missing here. Maybe Claire could fill her in. 

Dean had a determined look in his eye. “That’s how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Use me as bait.”

Now Unity was sure she missed something. Maybe a cold medicine smoothie hadn’t been the best idea. “What? I don’t understand.”

“I think I’m gonna start tasting different to Renfield. I think something’s gonna start fighting him. If not, make it happen. Dose me with something poisonous, hex me, whatever works. Just make sure it’s something you can cure or pull back at the last minute, okay?”

“What?!” Oh, come on! He couldn’t be serious. 

“He’ll show up in person to see what the problem is. When he shows up, you take him out. I doubt Adramelech is going to be interested in his help’s food run.”

Unity was honestly stunned. This was a million kinds of crazy. Did he have a martyr complex? Why was he even suggesting this? “You’re in the hospital. Do you expect Jody and Claire to take out a parasite demon in a hospital?”

He shrugged, and grimaced as if sorry. “I never said it was ideal.”

Oh great. This sounded like a suicide mission, definitely for him, and maybe for Jody and Claire too. Now Unity understood why Claire warned her he might be dangerous. 


	7. Ambulance

_** 7 - Ambulance ** _

The day was so much worse than Jody had imagined.

She recognized five of the names of the confirmed deceased, and it was a seven name list at the moment. Confirming identities was basically interviewing people who left the Red Rooster before the explosion, and who had been working/who had they seen. And some people were calling in with names of people who hadn’t come home last night. A grim business, promising to be grimmer. 

Jody didn’t have to go around to people’s house and tell them their loved ones were dead, but she did, because she knew these names, and she felt terrible. She had no idea how she could have prevented it, but she needed to stop whatever Adramelech had planned for round two. Why did he even blow up the bar? Because he could? She hoped that wasn’t the answer, but with demons, it was fairly common. 

Jody went home for her lunch break, mainly because she wanted to use the punching bag in the garage, and maybe do a little scream therapy into a pillow, but she had barely taken a fortifying shot of whisky when Claire and Unity came home. Judging from the animated conversation, they’d been up to something. Jody couldn’t completely follow it, but they seemed to be debating someone’s sanity. “Please don’t tell me you did something you shouldn’t have,” she said, knowing the answer. 

“We talked to Dean,” Unity said.

“We have a way to kill Renfield,” Claire said, at the exact same time. 

Jody held up a finger. “One at a time. Unity, you have the floor.”

“Proximity worked, I talked to Dean, but I don’t think he’s well.”

That shouldn’t have made Jody laugh, but it did. It had been such a shitty morning, any levity was welcome. “You don’t mean physically, do you?”

“No. He wants us to kill him - or almost kill him - so that long haired demon creep will be lured to the hospital so we can kill him. But there’s no way in hell that works, and also? Why is he suicidal? Should we be encouraging this?”

“He’s not suicidal,” Claire argued. “He’s just died so much I don’t think he takes it seriously. And also, he’s a cocky bastard, and is probably betting he won’t be dead long, even if he does die.”

“Tell me exactly what he told you.” Jody asked.

Unity did, because, again, her manners were impeccable. Dean seemed to remember a little more than Sam, which was great, but once again, memory holes and a death coma weren’t stopping him from being the maximum Dean he could possibly be in this situation. “Well, you met Dean Winchester all right,” Jody conceded. “And no, he’s not well, but he’s managed to hold it together okay for a man who has never been fine in his life. Lives.”

“No, I’ll grant you he’s cute for an older guy, even with all the scars,” Unity said.

Jody was briefly baffled. What?

“They needed the angel sword to kill Adramelech!” Claire insisted, happy for the moment. “We can kill him with it. This is good news.”

“Dean said it was one of the things,” Jody pointed out. “We need something else, which he couldn’t remember.”

“I could talk to Sam again,” Unity said. “I now have more information to share.”

“I don’t need you abusing cold medicine on my watch,” Jody said. She turned her gaze to Claire. “And we can’t rush in to killing Renfield until we know what the hell we’re doing. We still have to figure out that part where we keep him from whammying us before we can stab him. Also, using Dean as bait is ... ugly.”

“It’s the best idea we’ve got,” Claire said. 

The fact that that was true didn’t make it any easier to swallow. God, Jody wanted another slug of whiskey, but she still had work to do. 

She put Claire and Unity to work looking through Bobby’s books, to see if they could find anything that might hurt an archdemon. Yes, it was make busy work, but she needed to keep them - no, strike that, Claire - out of trouble until she was back. Jody forced herself to have a piece of toast, and then headed to the hospital.

She had a twofold reason for doing so. First, to see if any further remains had been identified, and if the two people who’d been brought in with comas today were okay. (Renfield, along with being a creep, was also a glutton.) Secondly, to talk to friend and fellow hunter Rosa Delgado.

Rosa now considered herself “semi-retired”, because nursing was a job that ate up most of your time. But if a demon or ghost popped up nearby, she would put it down. She also functioned as a doctor for hunters who needed wounds taken care of without attracting attention from the police, a job description that had been growing scarcer by the day. It was the definition of a thankless job. 

She hit the place at a good time, Rosa was on her lunch break, so she was able to bust down the whole sordid story. Rosa wasn’t surprised the Red Rooster explosion was demonic in nature, as she didn’t know how it could have burnt so hot so fast, and have zero survivors. Archdemons were a new thing to her too, so she couldn’t be much help there. Then she came to the hard part of the conversation - the Dean part. 

She listened, with increasing disbelief. When Jody was done, she said, “I think that might be the most on brand Dean Winchester story I have ever heard.”

Rosa had never met Sam or Dean conscious, but if you were a hunter, the odds were good you’d heard of them. They were legendary, for good and for ill, but there had been a new wrinkle added lately. Namely, that Dean was crazy - crazier than even his Dad, which Jody hadn’t realized used to be a thing. Apparently, John Winchester had earned a rep as a crazy, obsessed bastard, which, if you had asked Bobby, was well earned. But now it had been attached to Dean, although not the obsessed part. Dean was more crazy dangerous, which, honestly was kind of fair, but also kind of not. He and Sam had been through a lot lately. It probably wasn’t fair to judge them when the worst days of their lives had been happening for the past twenty years or so.

“First of all,” Rosa said. “I can’t deliberately poison or drug Dean for fear of losing my medical license.” She paused briefly. “If I get caught.”

In a way, Jody was glad, but also she wasn’t. This didn’t feel like the right thing to do, and yet, there were zero other options. “I don’t want you to risk your livelihood for this stupid plan.”

“I don’t intend to. But we have to do this very carefully. We can’t risk other people’s lives. But they’ll be in constant danger as long as an archdemon and a parasitic demon are in town, so we have to get rid of them. Wow, this sucks.”

“Doesn’t it?” 

“Have any ideas about the blinding thing? I mean, flash photography may be the only answer.”

Jody really didn’t like that idea, but had she liked any of these? Every choice seemed to be between terrible and horrible. She was looking around, mostly so she didn’t have to agree to such a ludicrous thing, and she saw her answer. Not that it wasn’t ludicrous too, but at least it was her kind of crazy. “Tell me, Rosa. Did you ever play any pranks in college?”

Rosa looked at her questioningly, then followed her gaze.

Oh yeah, this was a terrible idea. But sometimes, terrible simply had to do.

**

Ideally, they would have done this in the middle of the night, but time was winding down, and they were no closer to figuring out how to put down Adramelech. The sooner they could get Renfield off the board, the better.

Rosa swapped a shift with one of the nurses working the ICU, so she could take over Dean’s room for the moment. She could give him something that should lower his heart rate dramatically, and hit him with adrenaline as a counter when they were done. The problem was, Dean had a high tolerance for drugs, and also, his heart rate was pretty low as it was. Dean could actually die during this whole thing, although Rosa was confident she could bring him back. Still, Jody hated this. 

Rosa got things set up at his bedside in advance, so she could hit Dean with an injection immediately. When Rosa left to take up her position, Jody was left alone in his room, searching his heavy jacket for the demon killing knife. Eventually she found it, although she couldn’t help but notice the beeps from his machines were getting slower and slower, and it was a little like torture. “Don’t die on us, you asshat,” she warned him. Supposedly people could hear in comas, right? “Or I’ll dig you up and kick your ass myself.” Sam would probably help, so that would make it easier. “We’ll use you like a corpse pinata. Fill you full of kale chips and tofu. And sobriety pamphlets.” If that wouldn’t make him live, nothing would. 

She shut off the lights, so the only illumination in the room came from the sickly glow of the monitors, and she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. If Renfield was your typical demon, it wouldn’t even wonder why the lights were off on such a dark day. It wouldn’t care either way. But it might give them an extra second or two, and they could use all the time they could scrape together. 

It felt like forever, listening to the blips of the monitors getting slower and slower, until she was sure she would hear that screaming flatline noise any second. And then her phone hummed, making her jump. Rosa had texted her simply  _ He’s here _ . 

Jody stepped into the narrow bathroom, and left the door partially ajar. Anxiety burned in her stomach, but she simply gripped the hilt of the knife tightly. The hardest thing about all of this was being patient, waiting for the right second to move, and move fast. She tried to take comfort in the fact she was working with an experienced adult hunter, who was more than capable of understanding the risks involved. 

Now, more of a waiting game, with the added tension of knowing a killer would be here any minute now. A killer who didn’t need to touch you, only needed to see you. Jody hoped Rosa’s college days weren’t too far behind her, because that was where everything could go tits up.

Jody didn’t hear the door open at all, she simply got the sense she was no longer alone in the room. Well, technically, she had never been alone, but someone else was here with her and Dean, someone not invited to the party. 

Could a demon drag an aura with it? Because she suddenly felt itchy, like she had a million ants crawling all over her, and an oily feeling in the back of her mouth. Parasite demons were new to her, and she hoped they remained rare, because you could taste the toxicity. He was a walking biohazard. 

He was also ... humming? Well, sort of. It was like a hum by someone who had never heard music. It was tuneless and somehow wrong, even though she couldn’t put her finger on why that was. She got the sense that if she listened to it too much longer, it would seriously grate on her nerves, maybe even drive her crazy.  There was a smell too. A little like motor oil, and a little like moldy plates on food left out to congeal. If he added bong water to it, it would have smelled like a college dorm room she was in once. 

Suddenly the door to the room slapped open, and Rosa shouted, “Hey asshole!” What followed was the special hiss of a fire extinguisher, hopefully in his face. They’d decided Rosa wouldn’t look in the room, simply spray it blind, in the hopes that he wouldn’t see her before Jody could get him. 

Rosa was really emptying the canister, filling the room with cold, chemical fog, and Jody heard the demon make a spitting noise. “Stupid bitch,” he snapped. He had a voice like a rusty chain being dragged over gravel. “I’m gonna eat your brains.”

Jody was out then, running towards Renfield, who had almost made it back to the doorway. He turned, but Jody never slowed, and by the time he looked at her with his black eyes, the knife was already buried hilt deep in his chest.

For a millisecond, she felt something, like a mental tug that threatened to pull her consciousness away, but his chest lit up with explosions of light as the demon inside was burned away. Renfield had a millisecond to sneer before his eyes emptied, and he fell to the floor, like the two hundred pound sack of shit he was. 

Rosa came in, dropping the fire extinguisher by the door. “He gone?” she asked, even as she stepped over his body. 

“Looks like it,” Jody said, in no hurry to pull out the knife. Presumably, once the internal fireworks display was done, he was gone, but she wanted to make extra sure with this bastard. If this wasn't a hospital, she'd have been tempted to put a couple of bullets in his head. 

Rosa was injecting something into Dean’s intravenous line, muttering to herself, “Don’t die on me, you bastard. This was your idea in the first place.”

Jody wondered when Adramelech would know his “friend” was not coming back, and what he would do when he realized humans had killed him. She really had to come up with an action plan, and fast. 

On the plus side, at least, already being in a hospital, it was super easy to dispose of a dead body. The one bright side of this entire shitty day. 


	8. Eyes Spliced Open

_** 8 - Eyes Spliced Open ** _

Jody had been hoping, with Renfield’s death, Sam and Dean - and the rest of the coma patients - would snap right out of it immediately. Sadly, that didn’t happen. They were going to need some time to recover from the state that Renfield had thrown them into. It wasn’t totally unexpected, but it was still disappointing. She still needed Sam and Dean’s help in taking out Adramelech. 

And after all this? She still had to return to the station. She helped Rosa get Renfield’s body on a gurney, and Rosa took it from there. Jody kept the knife, at least until either Sam or Dean were conscious enough to take it back. Probably wouldn’t even wound Adramelech, but it was still nice to have.

Identities of the dead were trickling in, and she needed to make a few more stops to talk to families. Frankly, she’d rather fight another parasitic demon, but she had no choice. 

Still, Jody gave herself a moment to really think in her office, and sift through the clues that were available. Why did Adramelech and Renfield take Sam’s laptop? There had to be something on the laptop they wanted - or didn’t want other people finding. As for Dean’s gun, it couldn’t hurt either of them - unless it could. Jody dug the bullet out of her pocket, the one Claire took from the Impala. Was it a normal bullet?

She took a bullet from her service weapon, and weighed them in her hand. The bullet from the Impala was a little heavier, wasn’t it?

She knew the Winchesters made their own bullets sometimes. It wasn’t like you could run down to the local sporting goods store and pick up a handful of silver bullets. She had a rig kit too, just for that reason. Very carefully, she pried apart the casing. 

It had gunpowder in it, sure, but also other things. Bone dust, ashes, maybe grave dirt? And some crushed up tiny green leaves, maybe an herb? Some of it was wet, and touching it, she drew back a finger that was red at the tip. Blood?! Yeah, this was a special bullet all right. There was an awful lot of mojo stuffed in this tiny casing. 

That’s why it was left in the glove compartment. It was not an afterthought or a spare bullet - it was the back up plan in case they were taken out. They left it behind for the people to come after them to pick up. It was plan B. She carefully put the bullet casing back together, and hoped she didn’t leave any of the stuff behind. 

Renfield must have showed up to the impound lot to double check that none of those special bullets were left in the car, but Claire found it first. Holy shit - did Claire not listening to her actually pay off? She wasn’t sure she was ready to tell her that. 

So the bullet and the sword had to be used in tandem to kill Adramelech? The logistics of that was a nightmare. First of all, he was an archdemon - he could kill them as soon as look at them, and would he really allow himself to be shot? The really powerful demons were pure nightmare fuel. It was doubtful the fire extinguisher trick - or Unity’s flash photography idea - would work at all. Jody couldn’t help but wonder if Sam and Dean had drawn up a plan for that.

It would have helped if she had any idea where Adramelech was. She had no clue where he’d holed up. Maybe the best hotel in town? It was a guess from his whole clotheshorse designation. If he was into fancy clothes, he’d probably be into fancy everything. Once she had the thought, Jody found herself unable to shake it. She knew exactly where he was. And he was surrounded by civilians. Wow. There were no good choices here, were there?

Unable to think about it much longer, she got busy on notifying families about their missing members. She was talking to the Pemberton family about their missing, presumed dead loved one, when an emergency call came over the radio. “Uh, Sheriff,” Addy said. “We just had a massive fire break out on Adams Street.”

It could have been an accident; it could have been an arsonist copycat. Jody didn’t think. “Call the fire department, not me.”

“Uh, no ... ma’am, the entire block is on fire. I thought maybe there was a correlation between -“

“On my way,” she said, racing for her truck. 

Four blocks away from Adams Street, it was like the sun had set early. Three blocks away, black ash was salting down with the snow flurries. Two blocks away, the traffic was impassible, so Jody parked, and walked the rest of the way. What was in this for Adramelech? Was he simply an agent of chaos, who destroyed because he could?

Snow became a torrent of water with ashes mixed in, overflowing the sewer grates. The chemical smell of so many different materials on fire made the air nearly toxic. and she could feel the heat roaring from the street itself, making it feel like a blistering summer’s day. All she could see ahead was smoke and some tremendous flames breaking through the gloom. Fire engines made up a blockade on one side, and she approached it, as there were several men still there. “Do you know how it started? Was there an explosion?”

A painfully young man, who was probably closer to Claire’s age than hers, shook his head. He was putting on heavier gear, maybe in an attempt to get closer. “We don’t really know what happened. Someone said everything lit on fire at once, but I don’t see how that’s possible.”

Yeah, that didn’t seem likely at all, did it? She fucking hated Adramelech and wanted to wear his guts for garters, What the hell was his attraction to fire? Now that she thought about it, children being burned to death was how he was worshiped and summoned to this plane. So maybe fire was how he fed, or his power, or the only language he really understood. Maybe all of the above. 

Jody tried to see if she could help, but she really couldn’t. It was so hot on the street, the firemen were trying to hose it down enough to safely advance and see if there was anyone anywhere who may have survived this. Jody already knew no one had. Adramelech didn’t like to leave survivors. 

She drove home, still looking forward to working on the punching bag and just screaming, but you know what? She also wanted to save it all for Adramelech. She wanted to pummel that son of a bitch, just really unload on him with her nightstick. Problem was, it wouldn’t do anything to him. Still, she might feel a little better. 

As soon as she walked inside her house, she was greeted by an eager Claire, and a more reserved Unity. “We found something,” Claire said, holding one of Bobby’s journals out towards her. 

“You did?” She tried to tamp down the surprise, but didn’t know if she succeeded. 

“Yeah, it says here that something called holy oil can supposedly trap archdemons the same way as it traps archangels... and well, there is at least a page of talking about the theological ramifications of that.”

Jody could imagine that last bit. “What the hell’s holy oil?” 

Claire shrugged, and Unity said, “Yeah, we’ve been trying to figure that out as well. And I still can’t believe you never told me about angels.”

“We were waiting for a better time,” Jody said. Seemed unfair to swamp her with so much information right up top. 

Jody transitioned into research mode, even though it was painful, as she would rather act, but what could she act on exactly? Yes, bullet and sword, and she had a good idea where Adramelech was. Had she figured out how to kill him yet without getting a bunch of people killed, and herself as well? Nope. 

She put on the kettle for some tea - she’d had too much coffee today as it was; she could barely sit still - when there was a forceful knock at the door. She shared a wary look with Claire, and started to reach for her service weapon, when Unity said, “No, it’s okay.”

Claire gave her a scrutinizing look. “You know who’s at the door?”

Unity shrugged. “Usually if I crossed into someone’s headspace, I get a sense of them when I run into them again. If I do. I really have no idea how any of this works.”

“Join the club,” Jody said, leaving her gun where it was as she answered the door.

Rosa was standing there, with a pale, drawn Sam next to her. “Okay, he’s your problem now. Good luck.” 

“Sam!” Jody said, giving him a hug. It was nice to see him not horizontal. He hugged her back, but she could tell he was not exactly at full strength, although he’d probably pretend he was, just to not sit on the sidelines. “Thanks Rosa.”

Rosa was already half way to her car, and snuggled deep in her silver puffy parka. “He shouldn’t have left the hospital so early, but I figured you could fight with him about that. I’ve already had enough drama for the day.” Rosa threw her a faint smile and a wink, letting Jody know it was okay. Which was good, because that wasn’t a bridge Jody wanted to burn.

As soon as Sam was inside, he said, “We heard about the fire on our way here. Adramelech?”

Jody nodded. “This fucker ain’t wasting any time. Want some tea?” Sam really did look pale and shaky, and probably should have still been in the hospital, but she also knew why he wasn’t. Hard to recuperate when there was an archdemon trying to burn a city down. 

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Hi again,” Unity said. 

“Hello yourself, “Sam said, taking a seat with them at the dining room table. “Glad to know you’re real.”

“You thought there was a chance I wasn’t?”

“Couldn’t rule out the possibility I was talking to some part of myself, or something else.”

“Do you speak to a lot of people in your head?”

Sam laughed weakly. “Sometimes I think that’s all I do.”

“Do you know what holy oil is?” Claire asked.

“Yeah, we have some in the trunk. Why?”

Jody grimaced to herself. Of course they had some. She bet she could ask for some random thing - fan belt, coffee table, hamster, Cochella wristband, hard-boiled egg - and the Winchesters would have it in their trunk. They’d be the worst people to scavenger hunt against, because they’d win the game before it started.

Claire showed him Bobby’s journal while Jody brought out the tea and had a seat at the table. It was chamomile tea, because she thought they could both use the soothing at this point. 

After looking at the journal, he handed it back to Claire. “The only problem with using holy oil is usually the trap has to be set. “

Claire frowned. “What do you mean?”

Jody sighed. “They have to walk into it. We can’t just throw it down anywhere.”

Sam nodded in agreement. “And right now, I don’t know what we can do to draw Adramelech out.”

“Maybe if knows you’re awake, he’ll want you as much as Renfield wanted Dean.” Claire said.

The confusion passed over his face immediately, and Jody almost laughed. Yeah, that was a hard statement to parse when you didn’t know what had happened. “Uh, what?”

Jody managed to swallow her laugh, and gave him the abbreviated version of the story. He started nodding in the middle of it. “Yeah, that sounds like a Dean plan. Feed himself to the monster to buy time for the rest of us.” Jody could hear the weariness in his tone. She couldn’t imagine having grown up with him. It must have been exhausting. “So that’s why he’s still unconscious.”

“I was about to ask,” Jody said.

“Rosa said he’s recovering, but it might be a while. At least now I know why.” Sam was trying not to look worried, but he had this vein that popped up on his forehead whenever he was extremely concerned about something, and Jody could see it now. She put a hand on his arm and gave it a comforting squeeze. Right now just continued to keep sucking, like the biggest black hole in the universe had set up shop right outside their doors. 

So they had weapons to kill Adramelech, and a way to trap him. What they didn’t have was a plan to trap him or attack him without getting dead right away. And considering all the fires he was lighting, they couldn’t let him roam free much longer. 

“Didn’t you and Dean have a plan when you were on your way here?” Claire asked.

Sam shook his head. “We were going to get the sword, and figure the rest out. We just knew we had to get rid of him as soon as possible. Archdemons are right below Lucifer on the power scale. The longer he’s loose, the more damage he does.”

“Do you know what he wants?” Jody asked. It was a key question in figuring out most crimes. But Adramelech’s existence was a crime, so maybe that was a dead end.

“Beyond killing a lot of people? No. There’s not a lot of data on him in the archives. The Men of Letters seemed to think he was mostly theoretical.”

“The Men of Letters?” Unity asked. Oh no, another thing they’d have to explain. 

“But they knew you were after him and Renfield, right?” Claire said. She had the bright eyed look of having figured something out. “So when he knows you’re awake, and gathering weapons to kill him, isn’t he going to come after you again? As far as he knows, you and Dean are the only people who know how to kill him. And when he figures out Renfield is dead, he’ll probably blame you.”

Sam rubbed his face, and sighed. “I hate being bait.”

Didn’t they all? But they had very little say in it this time. 


	9. Balance

**_ 9 - Balance _ **

This plan was terrible. It depended far too much on luck and good timing. Neither Sam or Jody liked it very much. And yet, it was the best one they had.

First of all, Jody checked the best hotel in the city, to make sure they had a person who matched Adramelech’s description. They did, and that person had the most expensive suite in the place. Normally they wouldn’t give out that info, but Jody leaned on the whole Sheriff thing hard. By the end of that phone call, she could have asked for the staff’s credit card numbers and the manager would have given them to her. 

  
She also found out a nice little tidbit that was at least a relief - being that this was hardly “tourist season” - was there one? - and the frackers had moved on months ago, most of the hotel was empty. So at least, if everything went tits up, there wouldn’t be too much collateral damage. Maybe that was the best they could hope for. 

Sam didn’t want to wait for Adramelech to come for him. There was little chance they could get the upper hand in such an encounter. As it stood, that was probably impossible. So they were going to have to try and set up an ambush on a being who was extremely hard to ambush. Again, this was total ridiculousness. Honestly, if Jody didn’t have to do this, she would have shaken her head in disbelief at everything about this. 

Jody and Sam wanted Claire to stay home, but she refused. (Unity was fine with going home. She wished them luck and left. Could she adopt Unity? Jody wondered if that was a possibility. She was so nice.) It was her sword, so she was going where they went. Sam hated this as much as Jody did, but decided that if she was coming along, she came with protection. Sam had to give her a bottle of holy oil to get the sword from her anyway. Jody knew both she and Sam were secretly hoping Dean would show up at some point, because they could really use some of his innate ability to fuck shit up. So far, he hadn’t.

They entered the hotel to much attention, since Sam was holding a sword, but Jody flashed her badge, said official business, and advised the people manning the desk to evacuate until further notice. They looked at her like she was crazy - what official Sheriff’s business involved a guy with a sword? - but their deference to authority eventually triumphed, and they left the hotel. There were three fewer people they had to worry about. 

In the elevator going to the private suite, they didn’t say anything, because what was there to say? They had their shitty plan worked out, such as it was. They were probably going to die. But if they could take this bastard with them, it would be worth it. She hoped.

The elevator doors slid open on a private hallway, and their plan went immediately to shit. 

Jody felt something like an invisible fist, made of stone, punching her in the chest and pinning her against the back wall. The opposite happened to Sam. He was yanked out by invisible hands, the sword tumbling to the floor, and he was thrown face first into a wall, ten feet down the corridor. “Did you really think you could sneak up on me? How stupid are you?”

Adramelech was a bit farther down the corridor, dressed in a well-tailored black suit, with edges so crisp they looked like they could cut. He had a male model pose and cool that should have made him seem silly, and yet it didn’t. It kind of had the opposite effect, like they were being threatened by the world’s most lifelike android. It didn’t help that his eyes were like a lava lamp.

Jody hoped she was hallucinating from partial asphyxiation, but she probably wasn’t, simply because the effect was so disturbing. His eyes had a deep crimson glow, but there were black bits in it, swirling and moving constantly. Maybe he was full of lava. Considering he lit an entire block on fire, that would make sense. 

Sam pushed himself up, back against the wall. Blood was gushing out of his nose, and she wondered if he’d broken it. Hard to tell from here. Jody was taking shallow breaths, and wondered if some of her ribs were broken. That’d be a bitch. She was still trying to move, but it wasn’t working. Jesus, he was doing this all with his mind?

It looked like Sam was trying to stand, but he couldn’t. “Not as stupid as Renfield.”

Adramelech smirked. “Is that what you called him? Of course he was stupid. No one wants a valet who is smart.” He crouched down, putting himself closer to Sam’s eye level. “Are you applying for the position, meat?”

Sam spit blood in his face, and pulled all of Adramelech’s fury. He grabbed Sam by the neck and hauled him up, and the force holding up Jody was released so drastically she slid to the floor. Was Adramelech ignoring her? It was starting to look that way. At least that part of the plan was holding up. 

The archdemon’s eyes were glowing like small nuclear furnaces, casting bloody shadows on the wall. His male model visage was twisted and feral with fury. “Do you know why you’re still alive, you insignificant piece of filth? Because I can smell Lucifer all over you. You were his bitch, weren’t you? A vessel without something possessing it is simply a husk, a shadow. You have no reason to exist.”

“Still jealous of him?” Sam asked, his voice a strangled whisper.

Adramelech didn’t like that. Flames suddenly erupted in a very rigid line, at the end of the hall and the front. In fact, the little flame wall cut Jody off from the rest of the hallway, but her ability to now move allowed her to pull the sword back into the elevator before it got baked. If it could get baked. Angel sword - who the fuck knew what its weaknesses were? It was actually a little lighter than she expected. None of this kept her from wincing at the twinge in her side. Definitely a broken rib. 

The flames were hotter than they should have been, and yet the rest of the hall wasn’t catching on fire. Yet. Who knew how long that would hold. Jody was already sweating like she was in a sauna. 

Adramelech’s eyes were somehow glowing brighter, the light spilling out of his eye sockets and pouring down his face like bloody tears. He was snarling, and his face was so close to Sam’s he could have kissed him. Maybe he was considering it. “I made him. He would have gotten nowhere without me, and how does he repay me? With treachery and lies. I’m going to wear you like a suit, meat, and kill him. Wouldn’t that be fun, Samuel? Murdering your eternal tormentor? Not that you’ll get to enjoy it, but that’s never the point, is it?”

Was it the flame line between her and the hallway making her see things, or was Sam’s coat starting to smolder? Shit. None of this was good.

And that’s when everything went even further off the rails. 

Jody heard the noise, a small squeal, like from a rusty hinge, and she had mentally put together what it could have been - and probably was - when Claire appeared through the fire stairs and threw her lit bottle of holy oil. 

It smashed into Adramelech’s side, and he roared in pain and made a dismissive wave with his hand, sending Claire flying down the stairwell with a shriek. The archdemon dropped Sam, who thudded unceremoniously to the floor, and turned towards the fire stairs. “Maggot, you think to hurt me?”

Jody grabbed the sword and lobbed it towards Sam. He stretched out and barely caught it. Adramelech clearly sensed the divinity of the thing, as he started turning back towards Sam. The holy oil was still on his body, still eating at him with blue flames, not revealing skin underneath but more of that swirling black ash. And that’s when Jody realized it - he wasn’t made of smoke. It was ashes. He was the patron saint of ruin, and he was made of it. 

Sam didn’t try and stand, he simply grabbed the sword and shoved it deep into Adramelech's stomach, angled upward. Although Adramelech’s bloody eyes were wider still, bigger clumps of ash circulating in their depths, it didn’t seem to slow him, as he reached for Sam with red flames appearing at the end of his fingertips. 

And that’s when Jody shot him.

Sam had the sword, she had the bullet. She knew she was standing in for Dean, but she didn’t care. She wanted a piece of putting this bastard down, no matter what role she had to play. 

It hit perfect center mass, only a couple of inches above where his solar plexus would be if he had one. She wanted to see Dean make that shot. 

Adramelech finally looked at her, his gaze heavy, a force more than anything else, but she also saw what looked like purple smoke erupting from the bullet wound. It seemed to swirl around the angel sword in his gut, and while he grabbed the hilt as if to pull it out, his hand dissolved on it, became a pile of ash that fell to the charred carpet. He roared, more in fury than in pain, and he suddenly became a pillar of black ashes that turned gray, and collapsed into a heap. The angel sword fell on top of it, no worse for wear.

And now, no longer being supernaturally interrupted, sirens screamed, and the overhead sprinklers kicked on. Jody was glad she was in the elevator. Except, yeah, she was going to have to get soaked. 

She used the wall of the elevator to haul herself up, doing her best to ignore the twinge in her side that was more like a tiny dagger jabbed between her ribs. But she could ignore it, at least for now. Fire line extinguished, she stepped into the cold rain of the hallway, and asked Sam, “You okay?”

He nodded and gave her a thumbs up, even though he still had blood sluicing from his nose, and it looked like he had handprints burned into his neck. Jesus - Adramelech himself had been a furnace. How had he not set everything on fire?

Jody made it to the fire stairs, and opened the door. “Damn it, Claire! If you’re dead, you’re definitely grounded.” It was a joke that wasn’t a joke. She wanted to say something that made her feel very distant from the possibility that she had another child die on her watch. 

Luckily, she heard a bit of a groan, and Claire appeared on the landing to the stairs below, rubbing her neck. She had a trickle of blood on the right side of her face, but it didn’t look serious. “I’m alive. Is he dead?”

“He is, but what the hell happened to stay out of it?”

“Well, it was clear the other plan wasn’t on, so I ... improvised.”

“By making a Molotov cocktail with the holy oil?”

Claire shrugged. “Didn’t know what else to do with it.”

“And how do you know how to make Molotov cocktails?”

Claire suddenly found the stairwell fascinating. She looked around at it, at the walls, everywhere but at Jody. “Internet,” she muttered unconvincingly. 

  
“It was Dean, wasn’t it?” Jody sighed, putting a hand on her hip. “Goddamn it.” Although she had no reason to complain, did she? It was a distraction that had probably saved their lives. 

With Claire’s assistance, they helped Sam get to his feet, and only then did the sprinklers shut off. Figured. Claire also retrieved her sword, and the three of them made it to the elevator, a wet, bloody mess. But hey, they were alive, right?

Sam put his head back and found a bandana in his pocket - did he have magic pockets too? - and was putting pressure on his nose, trying to stop the bleeding. The fact that he knew to do this told Jody this was hardly the first time he’d been hurt in this way. But he was quiet, and his eyes seemed turned inward, and Jody wondered if anything Adramelech had said had unnerved him. She didn’t really think about how Lucifer had used Sam as a vessel, and all the trauma that must have dragged with it. Both he and Dean needed a few hundred years worth of therapy, and then maybe they’d be okay. As it was, she didn’t know how PTSD didn’t cripple the both of them. Could an angel make that go away?

As soon as they reached the lobby, they heard, “Oh man, did I miss it?”

Dean was standing by the entrance to the emergency stairs, and came over to help as soon as he saw Sam was hurt. Jody gratefully let him take Sam’s weight, because damn, her side was hurting. She was doing her best to ignore it, but it just wasn’t working. She figured with a couple of beers and a painkiller, she’d be ... well, not good exactly, but able to tolerate it. 

Since Dean had Sam on his own, Jody put her arm around Claire’s shoulders, and admitted, “You did good, kid.”

Claire smiled, and it seemed her eyes lit up with genuine delight. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze. “You’re still grounded.”

“Oh, come on!” 

Yep, things were going to be okay. As soon as they put all the fires out. 


	10. Paper Highways

**_ 10 - Paper Highways _ **

**__ **

It would have been nice to say things went back to normal, and everybody lived happily ever after, but this was real life, and it didn’t work that way.

There was no way to actually explain how Sam had burn marks in the shape of hands on his throat, so they took him by Rosa’s, and luckily she was willing to patch him up. Dean ever flirted with her for a bit, which she played along with, until Rosa’s wife came in the room and he realized he really hadn’t a shot in hell. He took it well enough that Jody suspected he had hit on non-hetero women before. Of course, Dean hit on anything with a pulse, right? And some things without them. If he didn’t, you’d know he’d been replaced by an impostor. 

Otherwise, Sam seemed to be doing a bit better with Dean there, and it was kind of sweet. For all their bullshit, Dean seemed to function as a mental health anchor for Sam, and maybe vice versa. Again, co-dependent as hell, but still kind of sweet. 

Jody’s rib was going to take a while to heal, and she was trying her best not to be irritable about it, but she knew she was. She tried not to let it bleed into the condolence calls with the families. It was probable they’d never know all the names of the people who died in the Red Rooster explosion, and the street fire. It just burned too hot and too hard. There weren’t remains more than ashes that were slightly different from other ashes. No one could find a rational explanation for the heat of the flames or their rapid spread, so collectively everyone gave up on trying to find a rational explanation for it. It was kind of amazing, but Jody didn’t complain, because it made her job slightly easier. Not by much. 

Claire, for her part, was trying to listen a bit more, which was great. But she still caught her sneaking out of the house to take care of a “ghost issue”, which wasn’t great. Still, baby steps, right? Establishing trust with kids was the hardest thing, especially if all their lives, that trust had been abused. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Unity was a near constant visitor to the house, which Jody didn’t mind - in fact, she was glad. Apparently Unity needed an outlet to tell people about dreams she had about someone’s grandmother dying or something, as she could no longer actually tell people involved since they had a tendency to react badly to it. Who would have thought? She and Claire seemed more like friends now, which was good. She was a little worried about Claire pretty much having nothing but adult friends. Alex was still on the fence about Unity, but at least she was warming up to her. 

Sam and Dean swung by to say goodbye on their way out of town, and Jody was able to catch Dean alone in - where else? - the kitchen. He seemed to know he was in for something, as he had that nervous/guilty look in his eye. “So,” she said.

Yep, that nervous look going into overdrive. For such a macho guy, it was hilarious how so much emotion seemed to bleed out of his eyes.“Uh .. good job on killing Adramelech -“

“Dean. Did you really think we weren’t going to talk about this?”

“About what?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, and gave him the same look she gave Claire when she tried one of her evasive answers on her. “Almost killing yourself to kill Renfield?”

He shrugged, and she got the sense that he was going to try and brush this off as nothing. Typical Dean. “It worked, didn’t it? And I’m not dead. I mean, I figured the odds were low -“

“No you didn’t. You didn’t care if you pulled through or not.”

He shook his head. “No, I knew I was gonna pull through, simply because I don’t think Amara’s letting go of me that easy.”

  
Amara was that whole Darkness thing, wasn’t it? Jody still didn’t quite understand it, but she had this pocket in her mind labeled “Winchester shit” that she just shoved all the confusing stuff into. Her life was much easier this way. “How many times are we gonna do this? You’re not expendable, Dean.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“Do you really think I’m so bad at my job that I can’t tell when someone’s lying to me?”

He sagged against the counter with the smallest of sighs. “Some days are better than others.”

For a moment, that seemed like a non-sequitur, but as she pulled the sentence apart, she realized it wasn’t. He wasn’t making a comment about her or her job - he was talking about himself. And truth was such a rarity to pull out of Dean, it was kind of shocking. Was he saying he was depressed? Or fought with depression and self-worth? Jesus. With their lives, she didn’t see how both Sam and Dean didn’t constantly fight with it. “Sometimes the weight just feels crushing.” He pasted on a weak smile. “But then I remember, nobody’s gonna beat me. The one thing I’m good at is kicking ass, so I just have to get out there and do it, and stop being in my head.”

“Full of yourself much?” She gave him a hug, and he seemed to lean into her for a moment, like he really needed it. He probably did. “And it’s not the only thing you’re good at. You’re gonna hafta teach me how to sew one of these days.”

That startled a laugh out of him, and when she let him go, he was still smiling. “Okay, yeah, I’m good at that too.”

“I have this jacket that would be perfect if I could just get it taken in a bit. Maybe next time you drop by ...”

“Don’t press your luck. And also, I ain’t cheap.” 

“What, I don’t get the family discount?”

“I actually add a surtax for family.” He gave her a smile that was a little stronger, and a lot more convincing. “Thanks, Jody.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” she told him. As he was half way out the door, she added, “Although a little warning next time would be nice.”

He nodded. “We’ll do our best.”

Yeah, the Winchesters were messed up, but so was she, and Claire, and most everybody even tangentially related to monster hunting. You didn’t do this job without having had something bad happen to you. But on the plus side? You got to work out a lot of stuff by punching it. And Jody was very good with that. 

**

The End


End file.
